It All Begins On Opening Day...

It has become fashionable to complain that baseball is in decline. Sportswriters everywhere cry that the sky is falling: Games are too long, the sport is selling out to television, clubs are spending themselves into bankruptcy on lazy, overrated ballplayers. As columnist/television commentator Peter Gammons and sports agent Jack Sands write in the prologue to “Coming Apart at the Seams: How Baseball Owners, Players and Television Executives Have Led Our National Pastime to the Brink of Disaster,” “No one--player, owner or fan--seems to enjoy the game any more.”

By almost any measure, though, the baseball business is booming. In the face of a slow economy, major-league attendance has risen every year but one since 1986, and cable ratings are growing even faster. Investors eagerly lined up for the right to spend $95 million apiece for the two 1993 expansion franchises. The game on the field is in great shape, too; fans can enjoy Cal Ripken, Ryne Sandberg, Nolan Ryan, Rickey Henderson, Dennis Eckersley and many other players who rank among the best of all time.

Sands’ and Gammons’ book never does justify its rather hysterical title. We hear from owners who think that player salaries are out of control and that chaos is around the corner. We hear from veteran stars who think that young players are selfish and money-conscious.

Not only is this not exactly news--such sentiments have been commonplace in professional baseball since the 1880s--but some of Gammons’ and Sands’ sources seem to have an underdeveloped sense of irony. Carlton Fisk feels that many of his fellow players are overpaid, but does not hesitate to complain about his own contract. And there is much unintentional humor in Chicago White Sox part-owner Eddie Einhorn’s prediction of disaster if Japanese investors are allowed into American baseball: “They won’t care about the local communities, only about protecting their investment. Eventually one will move his franchise without league approval and sue when the move is blocked.” This from a man who extracted a new $250-million ballpark from his “local community” with a threat to move his team to Florida.

Gammons and Sands do not make a clear case that the sport of baseball is in serious peril or that, if it were, players or television executives deserve any of the blame. After all, both simply negotiate with a cartel of owners who hire and fire commissioners, move or establish franchises and run their business more or less the way they wish, thanks to baseball’s exemption from antitrust laws. What “Coming Apart at the Seams” does make quite clear, however, is that many baseball owners are very unhappy in spite of their privileges.

The bulk of the book is given to a gossipy, “inside” account of the decade of owner-player, owner-commissioner but mostly owner-owner conflicts that have led to this state of affairs. Starting with Commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s ouster in 1984, we follow the owners--many of whom outdo the greatest on-field prima donna in vanity and arrogance--as they lock out spring-training camps, illegally collude to restrict free agency, and achieve a poisonous labor-relations climate in a time of industry-wide growth and prosperity. Unable to solve their biggest problem--the inequity in local broadcasting revenues between large-market and small-market teams--today’s owners have graduated to such a state of disunion that they seem unable to agree, in Peter Ueberroth’s words, “on what to have for breakfast.” Issues of divisional realignment, scheduling and a new playoff structure wait, while the owners try to decide who, if anyone, should succeed Fay Vincent as commissioner.

Whether all of this amounts to the “brink of disaster” or simply the storm before the inevitable calm of revenue sharing in baseball, Gammons and Sands contrast the difficult present with a glimpse of a startlingly rosy baseball future in which all is contentment and prosperity. Players and owners cooperate and fans in glistening new ballparks watch replays, read statistics and even order hot dogs on seat-mounted interactive video screens. While some aspects of this vision are a bit loony--what are the chances that the year 2000 will see a brand-new ballpark in Havana christened Fidel Castro Stadium?--and there is little explanation of how baseball is supposed to get there from here, this too-brief section is by far the most intriguing part of the book.

If there is one trend in baseball more disheartening than all the bitter off-field wrangling over money and power, it is the increasing amount of attention that is paid to such things at the expense of the game itself. Thankfully bucking this trend is Robert Smith, a writer with much too great a sense of historical perspective to take the shenanigans of today’s baseball tycoons very seriously. Besides having spent a lifetime gathering stories from old-time players and researching the game’s history, he is, in his late 80s, old enough actually to have seen Babe Ruth play for the Red Sox.

Smith’s delightful new book, “Baseball in the Afternoon: Tales From a Bygone Era,” is less formal and more personal than his earlier “Illustrated History of Baseball,” widely considered baseball’s finest one-volume history. It has the feel of a summer afternoon spent listening to the author meander leisurely through memories of games and characters from seasons and ballparks gone by. The stories are grouped loosely around themes such as life in the old minor leagues or profiles of forgotten stars like Pete Browning, the original “Louisville Slugger,” and Lou Sockalexis, the Penobscot Indian after whom the Cleveland Indians were named. An entire chapter is given to Chris Von der Ahe, the outrageous free-spender and erratic meddler who owned the colorful St. Louis Browns of the 1880s and who could give lessons in headline-grabbing to his pompous modern counterpart, George Steinbrenner.

In two lyrical passages on his own amateur baseball career, Smith testifies to the powerful joy of playing baseball for its own sake, whether on childhood sandlots or adult softball diamonds. It is a joy that unites the fan and the major leaguer: When asked about their favorite moments in baseball, most ballplayers do not cite all-star games or World Series; rather, Smith observes, they “are wont to recall their very earliest days.”

This is not nostalgia; there is enough here of the rowdiness, violence and venality of baseball’s past to serve as an effective antidote for fans who suffer from the delusion that the old days were all good. In the 19th Century, an ungenteel era in which good manners earned one player the nickname “Lady” and any non-smoker or non-drinker was liable to become known as “Deacon,” umpires were so fearful of physical attack that a few carried guns while on duty. And Smith shows that the great Black Sox scandal of 1919 did not occur in a vacuum, but rather in the context of a sport with such an easy moral attitude that it winked at the customs of “trading hits,” in which players on opposing teams agreed to let each other’s balls pass through for base hits, and fixing the outcome of games that did not bear on a pennant race. The book takes on the myth of Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s first sole commissioner, portraying him as an impetuous and egomaniacal hypocrite whose strong anti-corruption policy was unevenly applied or, in the cases of superstars Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker, not applied at all. It takes a detour into more recent times to savage as well the memory of legendary New York club-owner Toots Shor, who comes off as a thoroughly boorish, jock-sniffing slob.

If Smith prefers baseball’s past to its present, the reason is not that there is any decline in the quality--or certainly the morality--of the game, but rather that the baseball business once operated on a smaller, more human scale. In the days before millionaire players and billionaire owners, ESPN and trading-card shows, baseball was less self-important. Like the pick-up games of his youth, “it was,” says Smith, “not a religious experience. Not a sacred rite. Not a tournament of knights-errant. It was fun.”