Anybody Home?

Men stopped wearing jackets, ties and fedoras to baseball games long ago. Trading cards have been preserved in UV-resistant plastic sheets for so many years that no one even thinks about wedging them in the spokes of a bicycle wheel. A 10-year-old fan has yet to watch an early-afternoon World Series game in his lifetime, and last fall he saw none at all. By the millennium, all fans as old as 31 will never have known five consecutive seasons played without some kind of work stoppage.

Baseball last week did not suddenly abdicate its deeply revered place in America's hearts and minds. Its decline has been under way for years, in the silent yet corrosive manner of rust. The playing of the first games of a championship season in more than eight months only confirmed that decline, like the hanging of a toe tag long after life has left.

Strange how we can see the game's demise so clearly through the eyes of a man born in the Dominican Republic, who manages a team based in Canada and who came to the major leagues before expansion, artificial turf, designated hitters, arbitration, renegotiation and alienation. Felipe Alou of the Montreal Expos sat in the dugout during the Expos' Opening Night game in Pittsburgh on April 26 and dwelled on the sheer emptiness of baseball.

"Something was missing," he said after the game. "A weird atmosphere. Coming from a foreign country, I gradually came to understand what baseball meant here, and it was missing tonight. I was sitting there in the middle of the game thinking we really have to straighten out the national pastime."

The very people entrusted with being the caretakers of the game—the owners and players—have neglected it. So what did they expect from the rest of us? Yes, there was a certain amount of joy over the return of the game. But in ballparks all across the country people spit on the flag of baseball. The return of the game was greeted with anger, derision, mockery and—the worst insult of all—indifference.

During the opener in Cincinnati a plane flew over Riverfront Stadium pulling a banner reading OWNERS & PLAYERS: TO HELL WITH ALL OF YOU. Fans in Pittsburgh threw the souvenir Pirate flags they had been given as a peace offering onto the field. In Chicago they threw souvenir magnets that had the Cub schedule printed on them. In New York's Shea Stadium last Friday, three fellows, inspired by Abbie Hoffman's sprinkling of money on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in 1967, climbed out of the stands and threw 150 one-dollar bills around the infield. Baseball, the agrarian game that once appealed to Everyman, now was regarded as the arrogant, elite Establishment. Earlier that day, in the annual embarrassment of riches known as the exchanging of arbitration figures, Andy Benes of the San Diego Padres, a career 65-68 pitcher coming off a 6-14 season, asked for a $1.4 million raise to $4.4 million.

The fans threw out insults, too. When the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Florida Marlins, the first teams to take the field this season, on April 25, doffed their caps to the crowd in Miami, the fans booed them. Shortstop Jay Bell of Pittsburgh, pitcher Tom Glavine of the Atlanta Braves and first baseman Will Clark of the Texas Rangers—all of them union representatives—were booed in their home parks.

The loudest statement, though, was the deafening silence of the multitudes who stayed home—maybe to watch an NBA playoff game on the tube, surf the Internet or continue pursuing another diversion that had filled all those months without baseball. Attendance at the 22 home openers played through Sunday (not including that of the Colorado Rockies, who moved into smaller Coors Field) dropped 18.6% from last year, despite various ticket discounts and promotions that had the feel of one of those filled-to-overflowing shopping carts marked REDUCED FOR QUICK SALE.

Bud Selig, the replacement commissioner who also happens to own the Milwaukee Brewers, has been the Nostradamus of doom, predicting for months financial ruin at the greedy hands of the insatiable players. Why, then, would a Cheesehead support such a business after listening to all that bleating? Few did. It took four home games for the Brewers to draw as many people as they did for their home opener last year.

Selig, the man who announced the cancellation of the 1994 World Series, strolled among the brats and the beers of the County Stadium parking lot before Opening Day and found it to be "exhilarating." He said, "I got a wonderful response," obviously not referring to the smallest turnout for a Milwaukee home opener in 22 years (31,426).