Baseball Still Hasn’t Won Its Fans Back

Once, not so long ago and not so far away, these were six of the most enticing, seductive words in the English language:

Pitchers and catchers report this week.

They will do so this Thursday. Does that do anything for you now? Do you feel the first relentings of a thaw? The first sweet tremors of anticipation? Or is your anger still molten, your attitude still unforgiving, still unbudging?

Me, I’m of a mind to call a truce, keeping in mind that a truce is when you bury the hatchet but mark the spot.

I’d like to wean myself off the rage, which has no nutritional value. I’d like to put down the grudge, which is the heaviest thing you can carry. I’d like to give baseball another chance.

But baseball’s got to meet us halfway. At least.

And that means we need a guarantee that it won’t abruptly abandon us again, won’t walk out in the middle of the season again, won’t kill the World Series again.

It means we have to demand that baseball produce a collective-bargaining agreement before we end our boycott.

If baseball will just do that, then I say we clear the screen and start fresh. At the same time, though, store what has happened in the memory banks. Forgive, yes. Forget? Never.

But the longer the owners and the players dawdle, the less cause we have to think that, despite their protestations to the contrary, they learned anything from that ruinous 232-day strike, the less reason we have to believe that when this season commences the last day of March it will last even into May.

Baseball has a rare opportunity if it acts now, because I sense that a lot of people are weary of the rift, miss the game, are willing to grant another chance. The rupture between the game and the fans shows signs of closure. And baseball does have some things going for it.

Cal Ripken began the healing. The grace and dignity and gentle, self-effacing aplomb with which he handled The Streak won us all. It was an uplifting reminder of how wonderful the game can be and, more, how achingly we yearn for heroes.

Every athlete - every last boorish, cynical, egomaniacal one of them - should be made to sit and watch a video of Ripken and how he conducted himself on that one enchanted evening.

The postseason generated further momentum for a baseball comeback, especially that throbbing playoff series between the Yankees and Mariners. Proof of its lasting impact - and proof that fans are in a forgiving mood - occurred last month when Ken Griffey Jr. and his electric smile signed a contract for more than $8 million a season, yet not a quiver of resentment was registered.

There was a time when such money would have generated cries of anguish and protest. But somehow all that money doesn’t look so unseemly on Junior.

Also this winter, the owners proposed, and the players accepted, interleague play, a concept that has been long past due. It enhances the impression that baseball, which has used tradition as an excuse to avoid progress, is creeping into the 20th century. Of course this is happening as that century draws to a close, but at least there are signs that baseball is willing to scrape off some of the moss that clings to its back. The game’s thinkers seem to realize that they need to act, to make moves with the fan in mind. What a quaint concept.

The game also enters this season with new national television deals. NBC and ESPN remain, and Fox becomes a major new player. In all, the TV package is worth almost $2 billion. Fox signed on for five years, a commitment that suggests it has confidence the game will rebound and not only win back fans but win over new ones, especially in the younger age bracket for which it is programmed.

I’m not so sure about that last part. I think baseball already has lost the hip-hop generation, that it is probably beyond reclaiming. The only way to salvage that audience now is via a radical change in marketing. Kids are weaned on the clamor and chaos of the arcade, and their sport of choice is basketball or football, because of the speed, the pace, the action.

What endeared baseball to us and to earlier generations - the waiting, the anticipation, the slow, rhythmic building to a climax - doesn’t sell to a generation whose attention span is roughly the length of a television commercial. Thirty seconds and they’ve ricocheted on to something else. In baseball, 30 seconds is barely time enough for one pitch, one step-out, one scratch, one spit, one adjustment of the helmet and gloves.

If I’m baseball, I consider some version of the shot clock. I start marketing my players the way the NBA markets its pros, but before I can do that I need to get the players by the napes of their dirty red necks and explain to them how this whole thing works - that it’s the people in the seats who enable them to drive to their union meetings in their stretch limos, that those things the kids wave under their noses aren’t switchblades but pens and all they want is an autograph … without having to pay 10 bucks for it.

And something else has been happening that conspires to make baseball look a little more appealing and a little less scruffy, and that is football. Specifically, the NFL and the way it is allowing its member franchises to abuse their fans by uprooting and moving all over the map.

Here’s a commercial that baseball should be making: It’s been 24 years since we’ve had even one of our teams move. It’s been, oh, 24 minutes since the NFL has had a team relocate.

What is happening in football tends to make baseball seem just a shade less callous and unfeeling.

By itself, of course, that is no reason at all for us to unfold our arms, turn around, and rush back into an embrace with baseball.

No sir, the onus is still on baseball to win us back.