Baseball Chat

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This column from the "Arizona Republic" just about sums it up for me:

http://www.arizonarepublic.com/sports/articles/1107boivin07.html

Baseball owners' proposed moves could come back to haunt them

Nov. 07, 2001

I see dead people.

They've gathered near Chicago for Major League Baseball's owners meeting. Really. No one with a soul would be contemplating the moves they are on the heels of one of history's finest World Series.

This is where we're headed: National League manager Bob Brenly at the 2002 All-Star Game filling out a lineup card of players that would best match up against American League pitchers Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson.

It could happen.

Just when we rekindled our love affair with baseball, owners are debating and agreeing to several mind-boggling tweaks to the game. Mystique and Aura? Meet Greed and Vengeance.

Example 1: Three franchise shifts, including the Diamondbacks moving to the AL West.

This move, of course, benefits few, unless you're Peter Magowan and the sight of Jerry Colangelo sporting a World Series ring is too much to bear. Bud Selig would be ripping the soul out of a town with a well-grounded National League fan base, let alone destroying some young but healthy rivalries.

This is how Colangelo is rewarded for doing what he promised: spending aggressively but winning a world title in a short time.

Well, excuuuuuuuse him.

Example 2: Contraction, as painful to pregnant women as it is to baseball fans in Minnesota and Montreal.

It appears the owners have voted to eliminate the Twins and Expos.

Huh? Didn't the Twins sit in first place much of the year? Didn't they have a solid fan base?

This move is about leverage, nothing else. For the first time in many years, it gives the owners a leg up on the players association, which will be put on the defensive because of the lost jobs from contraction. And that provides owners with a lot more fuel during negotiations toward a new collective bargaining agreement.

It's sad because a spine-tingling World Series has done wonders for the relationship between fans and the game. Not only because of the competition but because it came on the heels of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Curiously, we are all more respectful: players, managers, fans. The game has shed its skin of greed and selfishness, and we all know that when baseball is stripped to its purest form, there is no better game.

Didn't Selig see the ninth-inning drama?

Didn't he see how protective the Diamondbacks players were of Byung-Hyun Kim?

Didn't he hear the fans, representing both the Yankees and Diamondbacks, chant "USA, USA" together?

Why would Selig want to kill the momentum?

How many more times can owners sever the threads of tradition?

Doesn't Selig appreciate the power of the game?

Don't believe it? Ask 79-year-old Phoenix resident Maurice O'Hanlon, a World War II and Korean War veteran. In 1951, he heard a broadcast of "the shot heard 'round the world," Bobby Thomson's dramatic home run off O'Hanlon's beloved Brooklyn Dodgers.

"It broke my heart," O'Hanlon said. "I was on a boat to fight in Korea, and that's what broke my heart."

Sixteen years later, O'Hanlon's 17-year-old son, Richard, was dying of kidney disease. He called broadcaster Joe Garagiola to see if he could help cheer up the spirits of the gravely ill Yankees fan. In the mail a few weeks later arrived a baseball that read, "To Richard, best wishes, Mickey Mantle."

"It was like another life was given to him," said O'Hanlon, whose son died soon after.

Baseball has wonderful powers. But it can only take so much roughing up.

Reach Boivin at [e-mail] or [phone]