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PHOOEY!
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Get ready for a terrible idea
brought to life in sports
of TheColumnists.com
The game began 150
or 200 years ago, depending on the baseball historian you might
want to believe. They were throwing balls around and batting
it with a stick in Revolutionary days.
Civil War soldiers clearly played the game during the breaks
in violence with old General Abner Doubleday, later given wry
credit for inventing the game, hanging around the battle fields
and the ball fields.
The game really got organized around 1869 with paid players and
started getting hot with reported field fights in the 1880s and
1890s.
There were early national stars like King Kelly, Christy Mathewson,
John McGraw and Honus Wagner into the 1900s and gigantic figures
in mid-century such as Walter Johnson, Ty Cobb and the ultimate
figure, George Herman Ruth. The Babe saved the game and put it
eternally on the American map.
Baseball survived the World War II years, may have hit its peak
of interest in the 1950s and moved smoothly into the television
and free agent era in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Chicago White Sox won a World Series without any hint of
a dump in 2005 (as in 1919) and maybe the Cubs will win a World
Series in our lifetime.
What else could baseball minds do to excite the fans and generate
more income from more sources?
Play a World Baseball Classic. Fuggetaboutit.
This was a dream of commissioner Bud Selig about six or seven
years ago. It will finally come to pass starting March 3 and
end in San Diego with a championship game on March 20.
Why are they doing this?
The cover story is that organized baseball wants to spread its
wings into new countries, create new fans, display the game in
dozens of countries who had the misfortune of never seeing big
league ball players in action in person.
This is about the silliest idea for the promotion of the game
since Oakland owner Charles O. Finley came up with colored balls
and the stupid designated hitter rule slipped into the game under
the cover of darkness in 1973.
The World Baseball Classic will do more damage to the game and
create more animosity on teams than anything since outrageous
salaries started.
These players will have a week or so of spring training with
their own teams in Florida or Arizona and then shift over to
their national teams for the WBC series. No player is ready to
play serious baseball after a week of spring training and few
players will give much effort to the games against Venezuela
and China when they are representing Italy, as Mike Piazza is
or the Dominican Republic as is Manhattan-born Alex Rodriguez.
The players left behind in big league camps will look at their
traveling buddies as vacationers with a two tiered sentiment
on a team when they return.
A sore arm picked up in the WBC or an injured ankle will carry
over for many players into the start of the regular season with
a quick flop to the bottom by some good clubs because their stars
were out of the country for three weeks feasting on Mexican food
and South American drink.
And what about those baseball mad Cubans? They can play in this
tournament in Havana or Caracas or Rome but they won’t be
allowed into San Diego if they get that far. The U.S. doesn’t
like Cubans parading around California with plots to overthrow
our government or run away from their own.
The entire thing will be a fiasco that nobody will care about
and could lead to much damage on many clubs interested in the
good old pennant race in the U.S. of A.
It seems that the idea is simply a way to generate more income
for baseball owners in March when their expenses are high because
of huge training fees and their income is nearly nil with low
spring attendance.
Selig has been pushing this idea for a long while. Maybe he thinks
it will elevate his status as commissioner and bring him up to
the level of, say, Albert (Happy) Chandler, who gained fame before
his firing for allowing Jackie Robinson to integrate the game.
Selig should have rested on his laurels for getting a stiff anti-steroid
program into the game.
I cannot see how baseball-starved fans will turn on games between
these teams with one or two players from big league clubs with
local ancestry and all the others a class of foreign unknowns.
This is barnstorming baseball at its best, a throwback to the
1930s and 1940s, or a wicked money-grabbing scheme at its worst.
Instead of trying to find out if a U.S. team with kids from Minnesota
and Mississippi, Nebraska and Nevada can beat those baseball-mad
Cubans, the game should work on evening the talent around the
big leagues.
Maybe then the Cubs will end their non-World Series winning streak
at 98 years. Now that would be exciting.
©2005 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen caricature is ©2001
by Jim Hummel. The cartoon is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection,
1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This
column first posted on Dec. 19, 2005.
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