Baseball: War cloud darkens day of joy

By RUPERT CORNWELL

It's supposed to be baseball's moment of innocent bliss - the annual All Star Game featuring the greatest players of National League and the American League, celebrating America's summer sporting pastime.

But this year, the festivities which begin today at the Milwaukee Brewers' glistening new home of Miller Park will be decidedly forced.

Two shadows lie heavy over the grand old game, one chemical, calling into question the basic honesty of the spectacle, the other a dispute about money, pitting the players against the owners of the 30 major league franchises.

And if the worst comes to the worst, the outcome could conceivably be the death of top-level professional baseball in its current format.

Understanding the labour dispute is beyond most ordinary mortals.

It is about money - but who needs money in a game where the average annual player's salary is US$2.3 million ($4.69 million) and the owners are mostly billionaires?

The owners say that unless something is done, baseball will go bankrupt.

But one of their number last year paid US$660m ($1.35 billion) for the Boston Red Sox.

If baseball's bust, someone forgot to tell the Sox's new proprietors.

The owners also insist they are being bled dry by wage demands.

But who is it that bids up star salaries to today's ridiculous levels - the US$252m 10-year deal secured by Alex Rodriguez of the Texas Rangers being but the most egregious example? The self-same owners.

The last time baseball went off the rails was in August 1994, when a players' strike wiped out the last five weeks of the regular season, and - for the first time since 1904 - the World Series.

Eight years on, to quote the game's great folk sage Yogi Berra, it is "deja vu all over again".

The issues, unresolved, are the same, the protagonists identical. And, many fear, the outcome will be the same as well.

Yesterday the players' representatives met in Chicago, but did not set a strike date. They are likely to do so soon.

Heightening the sense of woe was the death last week of Ted Williams, a relic of the heroic age before and after the Second World War.

Regarded by most as the greatest classic hitter in baseball history, Williams in 1941 became the last man to hit over .400 for a season, a peak that may never again be scaled.

Williams' feats are unchallengeable and for the ages.

Not so today's records, when allegations about drug use have raised the suspicion that the home-run glut may owe as much to steroids as unadulterated athletic genius.

In 1998, the year he shattered the 37-year-old mark for home runs in a season, Mark McGwire confessed to using androstenedione, a performance-enhancing drug.

"Andro" was legal. But now, baseball must reckon with the far more serious charges of the 1996 National League MVP, Ken Caminiti, that up to 50 per cent of hitters are juiced on steroids.

The disgrace is double. Baseball, thanks in part to resistance from the players' union, has set itself apart from most other sports, which ban steroids.

And the drug rumours are polluting one of the game's enchantments, the constancy and sanctity of its statistics.

Was McGwire's 70-homer season in 1998 superior to Babe Ruth's 60 in 1927, when the only drugs of interest to Ruth were alcohol and nicotine?

And what of San Francisco's slugger Barry Bonds and his 73 homers last year? A thrilling late career surge by a 36-year-old, or something more sinister?

All the basic problems remain. The owners have a point when they say that something must be done to correct the revenue inequalities that make it harder and harder to compete. Attendances are down 6 per cent, in part perhaps because most teams are seen as also-rans.

As in the English soccer premiership, only a handful of wealthy clubs have a genuine chance of winning the World Series.

For Manchester United read the New York Yankees, winners of five straight series between 1996 and 2000. Just as in the premiership, the gap between the haves and have-nots grows steadily wider.

Bud Selig, baseball's commissioner, wants to make the major leagues more competitive by forcing the super-rich to share revenue with the poorer, and by taxing excessive payrolls. He also believes at least two of the weaker franchises should be folded.

But to the players' union, the owners' bleatings are no more than that, and their proposals are a salary cap by another name. It vows to fight them as fiercely as it did in 1994.

Stir in gallons of bad blood and reciprocal mistrust, and it makes for a bleak prospect. And for a less than joyous All-Star Game.

- INDEPENDENT