Players And Owners

Baseball's paying customers, as incongruous as it seems, have failed themselves. As a result, they are ready to fall into a deep depression over the prospect of the season being taken away from them because the players and team owners can't negotiate a labor agreement.Do we, the fans, have ourselves to blame? Ponder what has transpired in the history of the grand old game.The current strike deadline for the players walking, not to first base but out of the ballpark, has been established. It's Aug. 12. The baseball "plantation" owners won't budge.

I break baseball seasons into two groups. Those unencumbered by the threat of a strike, and those jeopardized by such a threat.The strike-free years are much more enjoyable. It is easier to follow pennant races and study box scores and partake in all the other staples of fandom when there is the promise that the season will not halt in mid-swing, rendering irrelevant all that has occurred.When there is the threat of a strike, the possibility that the game will fail to fulfill its fundamental promise to complete its season, everything has an asterisk by it. The Orioles are pretty hot these days, but it won't matter in the final reckoning if there is a strike later this year and this season gets bushwhacked in the fashion of the '81 season, which was halted for 50 days, skewed and diminished.

It would seem that the theme of the sporting week here in Bawlmer, hon, is as follows: A Reason to Cheer, Maybe.(We're obviously not talking about the winter meetings scoreboard that has the Blue Jays adding Paul Molitor and Dave Stewart and re-signing Joe Carter, and the Orioles adding Sherman Obando, which says all you need to know about which team wants to do it right. But we're talking about Bigger Things today.)It all started when two pieces of apparently promising news broke within hours the other day. We were told it's unlikely there will be a baseball lockout next spring.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- Change is coming to major-league baseball. How much and when are issues the 28 clubs failed to resolve in meetings that concluded yesterday.Revenue sharing, a future television contract, restructuring the commissioner's office and labor disputes were among the subjects discussed, but no votes were taken and no final decisions made, according to Bud Selig, chairman of baseball's executive council."Today was a day to express opinions on what they [owners] thought baseball needed," Selig said.

So far, the only thing more predictable than the course the NHL strike has taken has been the size of the public yawn at the news. Nobody around here cares, folks, not even a little. But we'll get back to that.Anybody who was paying even a little bit of attention knew that the NHL players union would be out on strike this spring. Anybody with even a smidgen of knowledge about the history of sports labor negotiations knew that this particular union, under this particular leadership, was absolutely, positively going to exchange hockey sticks for picket signs at some point.