Baseball Has Too Few Polishing Its Image

It is the 1990s and one of the most popular contact sports in America is the demonization of unpopular groups. In professional sports, that group is the major league baseball players.

Baseball players are being battered for being the greediest of the greedy, the most diffident and egocentric of the athlete-celebrities. They have been tainted by drug scandals, pilloried because polls show them to have fallen out of favor with American youth.

Baseball and its players must find a way to turn that image around because, contrary to popular opinion, the players who make up the national pastime are not a national disgrace. Not when players like Pete Harnisch, Dave Winfield and Cal Ripken are hard at work in their communities as well as on the field, not for profit nor notoriety, but because it’s the right thing to do.

Look at Harnisch, the New York Mets pitcher. Harnisch, who pitched for Fordham University, then the Orioles and Astros, has thrown himself into community activities his whole career.

“I’ve done a couple programs for D.A.R.E. in New Jersey,” said Harnisch, who lives in Freehold, N.J., of the antidrug program. “I’ve spoken to kids in schools and Little Leagues. Here, I’ve gotten into a different area giving away tickets with Bobby Bonilla, where we’re having some Little Leagues, inner-city children, Makea-Wish Foundation.”

Indeed, Bonilla and Harnisch have each donated 30 season tickets per Mets home game, a total the club has matched, meaning close to 9,000 fans will see baseball for free this season at Shea Stadium.

Harnisch also visits hospitalized children, often taking along as many teammates as he can. His teams have done their part by supplying caps, bats and other giveaways. The players do the rest.

“I’ve never been a huge name on the grand scale of baseball,” Harnisch said, “but even so, when we just wear our batting practice jerseys and walk in, their eyes kind of light up.”

Just the way eyes undoubtedly did back when Babe Ruth made that special connection with children. Or when Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente made that special connection with the still-disenfranchised African Americans and Puerto Ricans seeking the American dream.

Leonard Coleman, president of the National League, often evokes the image of those players when speaking of the power of baseball to transcend the field. And Coleman is saddened because such connections seem to have been all but severed because such “heroes” have been replaced by the stereotypical modern major leaguer, one tarred by scandal and sullied by the selfish and diffident behavior of a highly publicized few.

Then there is the image of avarice. “I think the picture that was painted over the last eight months was quite unfortunate,” said Bill Giles, president of the Philadelphia Phillies. “The word ‘greed’ kept popping up in almost every story you saw.

“But I don’t think the players or owners were greedy. We were just trying to come up with a system we thought was good for the fans, and the players didn’t want to give back what they had earned in previous negotiations. To me, it was an understandable problem we couldn’t solve.”

Still, the news media can and must report on the continuous labor wranglings. And the Darryl Strawberrys. And Steve Howes. And the suspicions of wife batterings and beyond. To not do so is to not do the job. It is baseball’s job to do its best to offset such images with positives. A 20 percent drop at the turnstiles this season is a testament to the sport’s failure to do so.

Now baseball owners and players finally recognize self-inflicted wounds for what they are and they have come to a pretty logical conclusion: that they are in the fight of their lives, not against one another, but for mutual survival.

“Baseball has been given the ultimate wake-up call,” says Gene Budig, the American League president. “Fortunately, we have a chance to fully recover, but it will take unprecedented time and effort on the part of players and owners.”

Harnisch warned, though, he was “not sure the right approach is to stand around and sign a few autographs for a few months and then just blow it off later on.”

Rather, it should take a concerted effort by owners and players to come together on a massive program to rebuild not only the game’s coffers, but its bridges to an alienated public.

“The most amazing thing is that in my lifetime we’ve never had a vice president of marketing or a marketing director,” Giles said. “Even when baseball was at its higher level, we still didn’t market the game as well as we should have.”

The rebuilding should have more purpose to it than selling tickets, jerseys and baseball cards, though. Its most important mandate should be to assure people that owners and players care about the game and its fans.

Fortunately, many athletes do not need such reminding. Harnisch speaks eloquently enough for such athletes when he says: “I’ve always felt it was important. Even if I wasn’t a baseball player, I’d be doing the same things. It probably wouldn’t have as great an impact, but I’m fortunate in my position to be able to do things like that. I really think it’s part of the job.”

So does manager Don Baylor of the Colorado Rockies, whose work with Cystic Fibrosis Foundation has raised more than $6 million. Baylor warns that “the game has never had a common cause, like the NFL with the United Way, something the public can identify us with; you have players out there doing good work, but they go in a lot of different directions.”

It is time for baseball to harness such drives and make a well-thoughtout effort to show the public the clubs and the players care enough about the game to not care only about themselves.