Baseball Today Has Left Him Disenfranchised

If the Pittsburgh Pirates’ season is a test of whether a small-market team has a chance, the results are mixed. On one hand, attendance is up 27% and a new stadium, PNC Park, is going up.

On the other hand, there’s everything else.

“Pittsburgh is a great bellwether for baseball,” Mayor Michael Murphy, who bucked public opinion to get public funding for the new park, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “If we can’t keep baseball here--and we’ve done all the things we needed to do to keep the team here--then shame on baseball.

“Ultimately, the owners and players both need to come to the middle to address the fundamental inequities.”

Those include the spread between local TV contracts for big-market teams, like the Yankees at $75 million, and the Pirates, at $21 million.

“What they’ve done, we’ve invited,” says Ben Fischer, who worked in labor for years before becoming director of the Center for Labor Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. “I care less and less. I don’t know who’s on the team anymore. Clemente and Stargell used to mean something to me. I care less and less.”

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Ostrich: Not that every former labor official from Pittsburgh agrees things are so bad.

“I don’t see this competitive imbalance even approaching what it was,” Marvin Miller, who went from the United Steelworkers of America to union chief of the baseball players.

“If the ‘have’ clubs were worried that baseball is going to start failing, that the fans won’t come and TV ratings were down, their self-interest would say, ‘We’ve got to do something.’ They don’t say that. That tells me the problem is not here yet. I don’t believe the current baloney has any validity. The game is as healthy as anything.”

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Hint for Marv: Ratings have trended down for years. Last year’s World Series was the lowest rated. The All-Star game got its two worst TV numbers in the last three years, a 12 and an 11.8. In 1970, it peaked at 28.5.

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Trivia time: Who is the only major league hitter with 50 or more home runs in three consecutive seasons?

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Bureaucrat blues: Having just decided it can’t bar freshmen from competing after all, the question becomes, just what, if anything, can the NCAA do anymore, other than negotiate TV contracts for its basketball tournament?

Critics say it should accept its diminished influence and hand over more regulatory powers to the conferences.

Athletic Director Rick Bay of San Diego State told USA Today’s Steve Wieberg, “I don’t want to be a doomsayer but I think we’re headed, if not toward the elimination of the NCAA, toward an NCAA that’s far different.”

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Journalist for hire: Answering criticism for appearing in a beer commercial, ESPN’s Dan Patrick notes he didn’t actually hold the brew, or say its name, Coors.

Not that anyone is impressed. Writes the Chicago Sun-Times’ Ron Rapaport, “Wonder how he would react to such a sorry excuse from an athlete he was interviewing.”

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Trivia answer: Mark McGwire.

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And finally: Ted Williams, on the prospect of the Red Sox abandoning Fenway Park: “Ballplayers don’t last forever. Neither do the ballparks they play in.”