Summer of Our Discontent

By LANCE MORROW

America struggles to pass the time without its national pastime

The True Fan peered out at the summer of 1981: before him stretched an endless, bleak expanse of weeks abruptly and unnaturally empty. He imagined all the stadiums padlocked, their sweet geometries of green so still that one could hear the Astroturf growing. The lazy summer inevitability that has always been one of baseball's charms (the continuum of it, the meticulous formality of its records, the lovely mythic accessibility of the sport's past to its present) now grew disheveled. Local TV stations ran ancient episodes of Gomer Pyle instead of ball games. Somewhere in a high-rise Manhattan hotel, Mammon and the Grinch negotiated free-agent compensation, the main issue in the major league players' strike--the old push-and-shove of player freedom vs. owner control. But the noises coming through the door sounded rather slow and stupid, like Brer B'ar: "Ah'm gonna knock yo' haid clean off." If the Soviet Union had invaded and installed a puppet government in Washington, one could not imagine a more profoundly un-American summer than the one that suddenly seemed in prospect.

It is, of course, an outrage, even a form of cultural terrorism. Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti, a Boston Red Sox fanatic, wrote thunderously on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times that the strike was "an act of defiance against the American people ... I appeal for it to cease. I do so as an American citizen." Those of Giamatti's countrymen who love baseball found themselves massively unedified by the collision of venalities that brought on the strike. Despite the sympathy the players may have attracted (they are correct in arguing that the owners are now simply trying to rob them of benefits that they had earlier won), most fans judged it preposterous that men with an average salary of almost $180,000 should march out singing, "I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night ..." Boston Globe Columnist Mike Barnicle gave voice to the sentiments of millions: "Both sides stink. Both sides are bums."

A little harsh, but that is the outcry of the passionate and deprived. The strike rudely interrupted a cherished American routine. Bernard Malamud once said, "The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology." The strike especially offends Americans because it has subverted that sense of the mythic; the strike has kicked the mystique of baseball in the pants and coarsely brought into unavoidable view things Americans try to ignore about corporate baseball: its pinky-ring crassness, its carnivorous commercialism, its obsession with the megabucks to be wrung from the lovely game.

The strike scattered 650 professional baseball players across the country--the poor men went into culture shock, along with their wives, when they found themselves awkwardly twiddling away at home. The strike threw thousands of stadium workers (vendors, ushers and the like) out of work; it wiped out the profits of the bars and restaurants around the ballparks. At the Cubby Bear Lounge, where many Chicago Cub fans like to do their pre-and post-game drinking, Owner George Lukas has had to lay off the day bartender; his business has dried up. The strike has disturbed not only the psyches of the fans but all the lives that depend on them. Fortunately, the San Diego Chicken has managed to cope. The Chicken, a cheerleader disguised as wacky poultry who has made himself famous by acting exuberantly weird at major league games, anticipated the strike and scheduled 30 appearances in June at minor league games. "Us chickens like the farms," he crows.

True fans tend to be both disgusted and bereft at their sudden cultural deprivation. Sportswriter Maury Allen of the New York Post says sadly: "There's a tremendous emptiness without baseball. Its absence creates a big void, and nothing, I mean nothing, can replace it." Americans are trying, of course. Former Texas Congressman Bob Casey, an Astros fan, is using his baseball time to burrow into a novel the size of a steamer trunk, Shogun. What are the stats on a samurai? Attorney Jim Murphy, who normally attends about 75% of Houston's home games, has found a peculiar substitute for baseball: opera, an art form that the sport somewhat resembles--at least if Billy Martin or Earl Weaver is involved. "My wife," says Murphy, "thinks this strike will spawn a cultural revolution."

Normally when they are deprived of baseball by the coming of fall, the most passionate fans withdraw into what The New Yorker's Roger Angell calls the Interior Stadium. In this inner game, the fan, his mind a brightly specific montage of players and plays accumulated over the years, recombines them in purely speculative fantasy: "Ruth bats against Sandy Koufax or Sam McDowell ... Hubbell pitches to Ted Williams." Angell has written about one of the mysteries of baseball's attraction: "Its vividness, the absolutely distinct inner vision we have of that hitter, that eager base runner, of however long ago." No other sport, he remarks, "yields these permanent interior pictures, these ancient and precise excitements. Baseball is intensely remembered because it is so intensely watched."

But the strike has driven few fans into the stadium of the mind. After all, the weather is wrong. It is disconcerting to go "interior" around the first day of summer. The exterior stadium, dammit, should be operating now. Besides, no one knows how long the strike will last--these fine mental tunings cannot be made in all the haggling and tumult of a strike. Across the country, fans and reporters, radio and TV stations, have collaborated on a variety of athletic methadones meant to get them through the crisis. One afternoon last week, Oakland A's President Roy Eisenhardt sat at home watching a video tape of a game played last August between the A's and the Baltimore Orioles. The tape helped Eisenhardt keep his mind off the $250,000 that his club lost during the first weekend of the strike.

On the opening day of the walkout, NBC ran highlights of Game Six of the 1975 World Series instead of the usual major league baseball game of the week. ABC ran the film Elvis! instead of its Monday Night Baseball. ESPN, a national 24-hour sports cable network, began live broadcasts of Triple-A minor league games. Some minor league teams reported increased attendance, but for most it was still too early in the strike to attract many fans from the majors. Newspapers filled their sports pages with accounts of memorable games from the past. The Chicago Tribune took fans back to the days when the Cubs were fighting for their last pennant (1945) and the White Sox for theirs (1959). Or else the papers had fun concocting elaborate fantasies. The San Francisco Examiner invented a staff writer named "Grant Wheat" (tip of the cap there to the late Grantland Rice) who proclaimed the strike settled on Tuesday and then proceeded to march the teams through a schedule full of offbeat surprises--terrible hitters suddenly erupting in orgies of homers, for example.

But the jokes were rueful; they would fairly quickly run out of laughs. People longed for the real thing. A Bronx man named Mark Feldman took his son out to Yankee Stadium to watch the New York College All-Stars play the New Jersey College All-Stars. The 2,000 spectators rattled around in the stadium like peas in the bottom of a can. "I always go to a game on Sunday," Feldman said wistfully. "I go to see the Yankees, the Mets, whoever is in town. I just love this game. I can't imagine a summer without baseball."

If the strike goes on for very long, and the unimaginable becomes the inescapable, what damage will it do to the American way of life? In the first place, it will significantly change the 1981 baseball season; it already has. The rhythm of the season has been thrown off; momentums have been lost. On the other hand, the Atlanta Braves have played so abysmally that when the strike began, the Atlanta Constitution editorialized: "Great news! The Braves didn't lose last night." In Atlanta, the strike may be accepted as evidence of God's mercy.

Some players will pay a sort of professional price for the strike. Pete Rose, for example, is looking to surpass Ty Cobb's record of 4,191 hits and become baseball's alltime hit leader; Rose is at 3,630 now, but at 40, will need another few seasons to catch Cobb. Indeed, he needs only one more hit to pass Stan Musial; he got a hit last week--in a softball game in Cincinnati. Tom Seaver of the Reds needs 48 wins to join that select group of pitchers with 300 career victories; at 36, he cannot easily afford to lose a season's pitching starts.

Ironically, the baseball strike occurs at a moment when the game is breaking all attendance records. If the interruption goes on for long, Americans might even begin to drift away spiritually from the game. The most profound charm of baseball is an illusion, really--the illusion that the game connects America now with an earlier America that we remember (falsely, in so many ways) as democratic and sweet and robust and green and essentially innocent. The strike has slapped some unlikable touches of reality upon the illusion. The charm may be a little slow in returning. --By Lance Morrow.

Reported by Edward I. Adler/ New York and Paul A. Witteman/ San Francisco, with other U.S. bureaus

With reporting by Edward I. Adler, Paul A. Witteman

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