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Life during wartime Even without Japan trip, MLB braces for uncertain presentPosted: Tuesday March 18, 2003 5:26 PMUpdated: Tuesday March 18, 2003 11:36 PM
TEMPE, Ariz. -- Spring baseball is supposed to be a time for routines, a time for endless ground balls and batting practice, a time for drills and more drills. It's supposed to be a time for a return to the familiar back and forth of the game. But baseball, like the rest of us, has been forced to deal with the uncertainties of a fragile world once again. With the United States about to embark on a war with Iraq, baseball officials have called off a season-opening two-game series in Japan. And so the questions, the doubts and the fears return. "It would be unfair and terribly unsettling for them to be half a world away -- away from their families at this critical juncture," commissioner Bud Selig said of the dozens and dozens of players, staff and family members who were just hours away from leaving for Tokyo. "With world tension so high," players union head Don Fehr said, "this is the prudent course of action." Only the hard-hearted or socially blind would find fault in Selig's decision to play it safe. College basketball plans to go on with the NCAA tournament, the NBA and the NHL will not miss a beat and golfers, both men and women, will play. But none of those sports has dozens of its players who will travel outside of the U.S., 14 hours on a plane ride, to play in the first few hours of an almost-certain war. The news to cancel the series was disappointing to many here and probably many more in Japan. More than 200,000 tickets had been sold for a series of exhibition games against Japanese teams and the two-game season-opening series between the Seattle Mariners and Oakland A's. It was to be the triumphant homecoming of Japanese star Ichiro Suzuki. It would have been the first time Mariners owner Hiroshi Yamauchi had seen his team play in person. Now we are left with the familiar questions. By the time the first regular season game is played -- the Texas Rangers at Anaheim Angels on Sunday, March 30 now takes center stage -- the U.S. may well be involved in a war against Iraq. Is it OK to play then? Should the show go on then? Does any of it really matter? "All we can do is play ball," Tim Salmon, the right fielder of the Anaheim Angels, said before the decision was made to cancel the A's-Mariners in Tokyo. "Every time we go out on the field, we do what we do in America -- live in the freedom that our country affords us." There is an apprehension about playing in wartime, evident even before Tuesday's decision. Athletes, famed for claiming that they don't worry about what they can't control, will try to quell those fears doing what they do. They will go through their routines, they will take their BP and they will try to get ready for the season. The fans already are trying to do the same, filling stadiums in Arizona and Florida, taking in the warmth of spring and the promise of the new baseball season. Still, the crush of current events, the uncertainty, the fear, remains. It's inescapable. "You know what's going on," says the Angels' Garret Anderson. "You just have to put trust in the people that are making the decisions, that they know what they're doing. I think it's necessary to take precautions. You don't take people's lives in a light manner." In the middle of meaningless exhibition games in the days before a new season is to begin, the specter of war serves as a fastball up and in. It has jolted baseball awake, as it has the whole world. Maybe the saddest part of the whole situation is that we've all been here before. The world was shaken by the terrorism of Sept. 11, 2001. Baseball went through it like the rest of society. Now, baseball is bracing again. Everyone is. It has become, sadly, routine. John Donovan is a senior writer for SI.com. Comments? To e-mail Donovan, click here. |
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