The foolishness of the baseball writers. Plus: More baseball memories

With sports writers so confused about baseball's labor issues, it's no wonder the fans are all at sea.

By Allen Barra

Aug. 2, 2002 | To listen to sports fans on talk radio, to see them interviewed on TV, to read their letters in the pages of the newspapers is to hear one loud discordant voice of confusion, and the reason for this is simple: The sports press that they read is even more confused. An A-plus perfect model of what causes this confusion is a column in the New York Times on Sunday by William C. Rhoden, titled "A Troubled Game: An Informal Poll."

In an attempt to "get at an elusive, gnawing truth about why we continue to put up with baseball and its labor problems," Rhoden circulated 17 questions in what he calls an "informal poll." I'll get to the questions in a moment, but if Rhoden had simply asked his question in the terms that he states -- let's say, Why do you continue to put up with baseball despite its continued labor problems? -- he might have gotten an answer as simple as "Because I really love baseball despite all these problems, not because of them." But you can't write a column in the New York Times based on that kind of response, nor can you build an argument on the kind of big, sweeping, absurdly unsupported generalities that Rhoden is given to.

Before telling us what the questions were, Rhoden asked one of his own: "Why do we in the United States continue to maintain baseball as part of the big three bread-and-butter sports -- along with football and basketball -- when soccer is clearly a better game?"

Leaving aside the point that Rhoden isn't, as he admits, a big fan of soccer, one stares dumbfounded at such a statement, wondering upon what possible evidence it could be based. Here's what Rhoden apparently means by "better": "The game certainly points us toward our global future more than baseball, a provincial relic that becomes less relevant with each new season. Soccer's World Cup, with its concentration of internecine rivalries and strong community identification, gives truer meaning to the concept of a World Series than does baseball."

Let me see if I've got this straight. Soccer should replace baseball in the hearts and minds of Americans because it's a better game, and the evidence that it's a better game is the World Cup's "concentration of internecine rivalries and strong community identification." I take this to mean that because the Cameroons have a decades-long antipathy toward Paraguay, Americans should drop their provincial attitudes and get with the world program. This is an astonishingly silly piece of logic, not the least because it takes the United States and not Brazil, Ghana or South Korea as the measure of "provincial." Is this point of view confined to baseball and the United States, or are Canadians, Scandinavians and Russians also "provincial" for preferring hockey to soccer? What about the world's most populous country, China, and its provincial preference for Ping-Pong?

That's only part of what confuses me about Rhoden's argument. By his reasoning, how do American football and basketball rate a place in our national "Big Three"? American football is a sport played by only a tiny fraction of the people who play baseball -- and I don't just mean in America, but in other provincial places where baseball is extremely popular, such as the Caribbean, Japan, Korea, Australia and Italy. I mean, if the World Cup is to be the measure of all things, then why does American football rate any recognition whatsoever? As for basketball, I would guess that the 99 percent of the world under 6-foot-5 is just going to be plain out of luck. I would dearly love to know what the reaction would be in black neighborhoods if Rhoden (who is black) were to tell all the kids there that they must give up their "provincial" identification with basketball for soccer.

It never seems to occur to Rhoden, even as a possibility, that one could argue that all three of these sports, because they utilize arms as well as legs, are more advanced than soccer and therefore it is soccer that should be considered the "provincial" sport.

Anyway, Rhoden says he distributed 50 copies of his poll at Shea Stadium last Friday with his "overriding interest being to find out how many of the fans viewed baseball players as fellow workers." This is about as confused an aim as I can imagine. I think anybody could have told Rhoden well in advance that the number of people saying yes to that was going to be very low -- it was, about 16 percent -- and that in fact the answer would have been about the same if he'd gotten off this silly anti-baseball kick and asked the same question about athletes of any sport. He also might have added that if Americans had not been raised in a society with strong anti-union prejudices they might see things a bit differently, namely they might consider that the Major League Baseball Players Association is not any less a union because it is spectacularly successful and that it is rather silly to argue otherwise.

I didn't say that it was a typical union, but merely that it fits every important definition of what a union is and should be and that every player who's ever been a member of it owes his prosperity entirely to the fact that they have hung together and created their working conditions as a union. Rhoden might also have added that if the people he was distributing his petition to did not understand these points better, it might be because he and his fellow journalists have not done a good enough job of explaining them.

Next page: The "When did you stop beating your wife?" school of polling