Power of Caring
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Small minds destroy small markets

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Posted: Wednesday June 09, 1999 12:00 PM

Sandy Alderson has been one of the freshest, most original presences in baseball, the designer of the Oakland Athletics teams that stood at the top of the baseball tree a decade ago. Last year Alderson left the Athletics to move to New York to be the No. 2 man in the commissioner's office.

A fine job, a terrific challenge -- but why give up doing what he loved, running a ball team? Well, Alderson told me, even if the A's were to develop the makings of another fabulous champion, what would be the point? Oakland surely wouldn't be able to afford to keep hold of his charming, new team of the future -- and, anyway, the Oakland fans wouldn't even be enticed to come out now, in the present, because they would know they were simply being led down the garden path. Oakland, you see, is that ultimate baseball second-class citizen, the low-life small-market franchise.

In a sense, then, Sandy Alderson, as one man, personifies his sport's universal problem -- the inability of Every Fan to any longer hope. Sports leagues work because even if you aren't a fan of the current best team, you have faith that someday soon your team will rise from the ashes. Only baseball, in its greedy shortsightedness, has managed to destroy that sweet reverie.

In Memoriam Sports Illustrated has lost one of its most important figures and most popular persons with the death of Jeremiah Tax at the age of 82. There have been only brief moments in the 45-year history of SI when Jerry has not had some association with the magazine. Virtually up to the day he died, last Saturday, he had been in the office, doing some of his spare-time editing. Surely, few individuals have had such a long and distinguished career over the whole life of a magazine as Jerry Tax had with SI. Jerry played a particularly crucial role in my early career, and I will forever be grateful to him. He was the basketball editor when I arrived at the magazine, fresh out of college in 1962, and, within a year, he encouraged the managing editor to give me -- this tender rookie -- the opportunity to be the lead basketball writer. He showed such faith in me that I didn't dare fail. Thank you, Jerry. Of course, I only liked you as much as everybody else did. Jerry Tax was a fine man, beloved. —F.D.

Of course, it is not just the owners of the wealthy big-market teams who are responsible for this estate. The filthy rich share an unlikely alliance with the proletariat -- the players' union -- which remains absolutist in its position that no limits should be placed on a player's right to remuneration and residence -- even if this threatens the very essence of sport, the faith that tomorrow can be a better day.

Other sports continue to profit by making concessions that keep hope alive on all teams. It is instructive that the smallest major-league market of them all, Green Bay, was the NFL champion recently; that three of the last four teams standing in the NBA playoffs this month represented some of the tiniest TV markets -- Indianapolis, San Antonio and Portland. This could never happen in baseball. Sadly, symbolically, it is Pittsburgh where the stewards of the National Pastime are meeting this week -- Pittsburgh, that very small market that so poignantly lost all its best players to the plutocrats.

The rich owners in baseball simply hold to the argument that I bought what I paid for, and therefore I need not share the future with my less fortunate brother. It's more ironic that it is the union that takes the fatalistic position that the poor must always be with us. The sound you hear is Samuel Gompers rolling over. The union loves to point out that baseball has always had its aristocracy -- look at the old Yankee domination!

True enough. But back then, despair was not economically institutionalized in the weaker teams.

Moreover, as Alderson points out, baseball had no real competition then. If you were a St. Louis Browns fan, you had no place else to go. But the Pittsburgh Pirates fan of today will simply divert his interest away from baseball altogether, taking refuge in more sympathetic sports. NFL franchises in particular are more valuable now because the whole entity stands together. Baseball is like Yugoslavia, provinces set against the whole self, arguing ancient history in order to maintain modern instability.

Baseball has many problems to discuss in Pittsburgh, but all pale before the fact that baseball remains the only sport that starts each season with the understanding that most teams -- that most fans and players -- have no chance, not now, not ever. Sport is a dream before it is a game. The owners and the union must appreciate: Deny the dream; soon enough, destroy the game.

The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.

These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNN/SI.

 

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