Two Strike Count

By Roy Pickering

It’s coming down to the wire, as it always seems to do with matters of disagreement between ownership and talent in Major League Baseball. A strike date of August 30th has been set. Perhaps compromises will be made before then that will salvage the season. If not, then I fear the worst is in store.

There is far more than the current baseball season at stake. A strike now will be the death blow to the sport as we know it. Sure, die-hards will never entirely abandon their favorite pastime. But for the majority of sports fans who have plenty of other options to choose from, another strike will likely be enough to turn them away for good.

I grew up on baseball, just like millions of American boys before and since. Thinking back, I can come up with no stronger bond between my father and I than the games we watched on television together. He was and is a Dodgers fan, his allegiance following them from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. I grew up in Yankees territory, but although my feet were planted in the Bronx, my heart went out to those loveable underdogs in Queens. But it didn’t matter whether the Dodgers or Mets or some other teams were playing on the tube. My father, and brother, and I loved the game for its own sake, for its grace and purity and majesty. We loved baseball because it was America’s finest export, inarguably one of our greatest contributions to global society.

I vividly remember when my family first moved to the house that I would spend the majority of my childhood in. In third grade at the time, I found myself in a new neighborhood with a new school to attend, and all of my former childhood companions were now beyond range. I had to begin my social life all over again. We had barely settled into the house when the doorbell rang. It was a contingent of kids from the block who were about to play sewer to sewer, self-pitch wiffle ball. They had come to find out if my brother and I wanted to play. We had never played baseball before in our old neighborhood, but we accepted anyway. The game quickly endeared itself to us. As it so happened, the kids who had come to our door were under the mistaken impression that my father was none other than Chris Chambliss of the New York Yankees. No wonder they were so friendly to us. By the time they saw my father outside washing our car while the Yankees were playing on TV and realized he could not possibly be in two places at the same time, my brother and I had already been fully incorporated into the youthful social scene of the block. During the spring, summer, and fall months, this consisted of baseball, baseball, and a little more baseball.

As mentioned previously, I took the difficult road of rooting for the no longer so amazing Mets throughout the late 70’s and early 80’s, rather than pulling for the consistently dominant Yankees. Year after year I came out on the short end of that stick. Childhood came and went, I enrolled in college to prepare for adulthood. At about that time, things finally began to look promising in Shea Stadium. Raw talent appeared up and down the Mets lineup. They had two budding superstars, guaranteed future Hall of Famers who went by the names of Dwight “Doc” Gooden and Darryl Strawberry. They played with a cast of fiery teammates who never quit until the final out. Proven talent like Gary Carter and Keith Hernandez were brought into the mix. This was clearly a team with potential, and it all came together in the magical year of 1986 when they kept winning and winning and winning until suddenly they were in the World Series. My heart was three quarters of the way to breaking when Mookie Wilson hit a dribbler down the first base line that looked like it was about to end the Mets ride to greatness. But then the ball miraculously found its way through Bill Buckner’s legs and the ride continued. When Jesse Orosco struck out the final batter in the ninth inning to end game seven, I found myself in the peculiar position of witnessing my greatest childhood dream come true. As the popular expression goes – I could have died and gone to Heaven. Except that there was no need for me to die to reach a celestial destination, because I was already there.

By the time 1994 rolled around, the Mets had sunk back into mediocrity, the late 80’s dynasty I had envisioned never quite materializing. The players went on strike. There had been several work stoppages in baseball in the past, but this one was the most devastating by far. It lasted 232 days, wiping out the World Series for the first time in 90 years. It seemed like forever came and went before pro baseball finally got underway again. Much changed in that time. Between the demise of the Mets prowess and my growing fascination with the NBA, Major League Baseball never fully reclaimed my attention. Basketball and football became the sports seasons I most passionately cherished. Other sports that didn’t have seasons to follow such as boxing and tennis also moved ahead of baseball in my list of interests. I didn’t understand why the millionaire players and billionaire owners were unable to get their act together, any more than I comprehended why Strawberry and Gooden opted for the rush of cocaine over immortality. I just knew that I was too old for wiffle ball, and the game as it was professionally played no longer moved me like it once did.

I am certainly not the only person who grew disenchanted with Major League Baseball as a result of the 94-95 strike, because it was widely reported that the sport suffered greatly from fan disinterest in the period that followed. Then Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa came to the rescue with their season to remember. Both men eclipsed the long standing homerun record, Big Mac ended up with an unimaginable 70 shots over the wall, and baseball was rejuvenated. It was impossible for even the most casual fan not to be captivated by that homerun race. The damage of the strike was underdone in Mighty Casey-like fashion.

Now here we are just a few short years later. Baseball players, having warmed up this season by accusing each other of enhancing skills with steroids, are back to participating in their favorite hobby, squabling with team owners over money. Never mind that the stock market is tumbling down and far too many people have lost legitimate jobs, not having the luxury of playing games for an extravagant living. Forget that we are at war with a madman whose followers express their hatred of us through terrorism. It's apparently inconsequential that the one year anniversary of perhaps the most terrible day in our history is merely weeks away. These things take a back seat to what most offends Big Leaguers - revenue sharing among teams and a luxury tax on high payrolls to slow salary increases.

In stark contrast to professional basketball and football, baseball is a game of haves and have nots. The most prominent member of the first group is the New York Yankees. They play in the country’s biggest market, have the most money to spend thanks in large part to an enormous TV deal, so they get first dibs at the best players. Consistently having the best players available on their payroll results in consistently winning more games than everyone else, followed by an annual appearance in the World Series. For small market teams on the opposite end of the capitalistic spectrum, their prospects of being competitive are bleak at best. There are exceptions, of course. Every now and then a small market team wins more games than it rightfully should. And there are always big market teams (head just across town here in New York to the currently woeful Mets) who do not spend wisely and end up with poor teams in spite of a rich payroll. But by and large, the exceptions do little more than prove the rule. The Yankees continue to dominate. Fans of other teams grow increasingly disgruntled as they run out of reasons to have reasonable hope.

Thanks to the existence of salary caps and a draft process that allows the worst teams to obtain the most promising talent, an organization in the NBA or NFL can go from awful to awfully good in a pretty short span of time. As each basketball and football season begins, fans have no clue which squad will end up at the top of the heap. Sure, every now and then a dynasty emerges. If you’re lucky enough to nab a Michael Jordan or Shaquille O’Neal in their prime, you’ll probably be treated to a nice winning streak. But that streak will be nothing in comparison to the Yankees' incredible 25 championships in 100 years. And no, I am not being a bitter Mets fan hating on the Bronx Bombers' success. I'm simply acknowledging a truth too blatant to ignore no matter who one chooses to root for. The rich continue to get richer in baseball. Meanwhile, the poor are in such dire straits that they may have no choice but to leave the league altogether. Even without a strike looming, Major League Baseball was in trouble. When teetering on the brink, it makes little sense to push yourself over the edge. But that's exactly what may soon happen.

If the players go on strike August 30th, I sadly predict that the game of baseball is doomed. Sports fans will head to other leagues where parity can be appreciated, where each season is competitive rather than just another countdown from one championship parade to the next for the same set of pinstripes. Baseball will undoubtedly move down a tier in popularity, joining hockey. If the strike lasts long enough, baseball will descend to the sub-basement with soccer. If players remain off the field for nearly a year like they did last time, baseball will be lumped in with bowling and volleyball as sports that people come across by accident on ESPN every now and then, watch for a minute or two, then move along. Perhaps I am over-dramatizing the danger, but probably not by much. The odds of a McGwire-Sosa godsend coming along to once again save the day are remote. Even fans most desperately in need of a baseball fix will probably opt to watch those who truly play for the love of the game rather than the paychecks, such as those still uncorrupted Little Leaguers. You get only so many chances in life. There is a two-strike count on Major League Baseball. One more strike, and they’re out.

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From John Updike's "Rabbit Redux": Though basketball was his sport, Rabbit remembers the grandeur of all that grass, the excited perilous feeling when a high fly was hoisted your way, the homing-in on the expanding dot, the leathery smack of the catch, the formalized nonchalance of the heads-down trot in toward the bench, the ritual flips and shrugs and the nervous courtesies of the batter's box. There was a beauty here bigger than the hurtling beauty of basketball, a beauty refined from country pastures, a game of solitariness, of waiting, waiting for the pitcher to complete his gaze toward first base and throw his lightning, a game whose very taste, of spit and dust and grass and sweat and leather and sun, was America.

About the Author:

Roy Pickering is a freelance writer residing in Maplewood, NJ. Having recently completed his debut novel, "Patches of Grey", he is now in search of an agent and publisher while hard at work on editing a novella and writing a second novel. Roy is in no particular order, an amateur photographer, a Jets and Knicks fanatic, a budding tennis phenom, a Playstation connoisseur, an aquarium enthusiast, and a fitness buff. Another of Roy's favorite leisure time activities is perfecting his technique on the tenor sax.

A showcase of his prose and photography is located at www.roypickering.net. Roy's fiction can be found in numerous magazines and ezines as well. He is a contributor to two short story anthologies, "Proverbs for the People" by Kensington Books, and "The Game...Short Stories About the Life" by Triple Crown Publications. To continue following his Sports Issues column, current and future articles will appear at Associated Content and also at Gather.com.