Big chill for summer game

Trouble as the American game - and one of its great players - head for the freezer.

As Tom Hanks almost said in A League of Their Own, one of the worst sports movies in the history of cinema: 'There's no tying in baseball.' This might explain why 41,871 fans in Milwaukee had a collective fit when the 2002 Major League Baseball All-Star game was prematurely ended this week with the score at 7-7. The two managers ran out of players who were fit and able to play, apparently - quite an achievement in a nation where every male between the age of eight and 80 would gladly endure a lifetime of bad baseball movies in exchange for a shot at the All-star game.

'I want to apologise to the fans who were here, but given the health of the players I really had no choice,' said Bud Selig, a Mister Magoo-esque figure who, as the Commissioner of Major League Baseball, was responsible for calling off the game. Milwaukee being the home of the Miller Brewing Company, it surprised no one that the fans responded by lobbing bottles in Bud's direction. Normally, such events might have been written off as yet another farce in Selig's farcical stewardship of his $3-billion-a-year sport, but not this time. This time many believe the bottle-throwing in Milwaukee presages the end of the love affair between America and the sport portrayed in movies such as The Natural and Field of Dreams as a metaphor for a national way of life. Given what's going on in the game - an imminent strike, allegations of widespread steroid abuse, and even the deep-freezing of a dead superstar from a bygone era - they may have a point.

Tomorrow, the fifteenth of the month, is pay day in baseball and, according to Mr Selig, the players at one unnamed club might not be picking up a cheque. Their club is bankrupt. Another (again unnamed) club is nearing bankruptcy. Two more have been earmarked by the Commissioner for 'contraction' - a euphemism for enforced extinction due to lack of public interest. Of the 31 professional teams in the game, 20 have maxed out their $72 million credit limit with Major League Baseball. Collectively, the teams owe $3.5bn. Attendances are down and the television ratings would give the folks behind ITV's The Premiership a superiority complex. In a sane world, all the above might be viewed as a pen portrait of a sport in crisis. In the world of professional baseball, it is merely the backdrop for the most insane act of all. Later this week the baseball players' union, which represents 500 of the richest athletes in the country (average salary $2.3m a year), is expected to announce that negotiations with club owners (average wealth per head $1bn) over a new collective bargaining agreement have broken down and that its members will go on strike at the end of the month. It will be the ninth work stoppage in 30 years, the last having been in 1994 - causing the cancellation of that year's World Series and an estrangement between public and the game that lasted through the rest of the decade.

Fully understanding the minutiae of this latest dispute would require a doctorate in employment law but it can be distilled down to three issues. The first is money. The owners would like a salary cap, similar to those in gridiron's NFL and the National Basketball Association, which limits the amount of money each team has to pay to its roster of players. Naturally, the owners want to pay their employees less (and keep more for themselves) but they prefer to dress up this financial self-interest as 'equalisation'. Currently, only the richest teams can afford the best players, hence only the richest teams have a chance to win - which makes for boring baseball. The players' union wants its members to make as much money as possible, which means no salary cap. As for the owners pleading poverty? Well, as one union rep pointed out the other day, no one ever got poor owning an American sports franchise.

A second sticking point is the owners' demand that two clubs, Minnesota and Montreal, should close. This suggestion was made by Selig in typically bumbling fashion the day after last year's World Series. His argument is that weeding out the weaker teams will concentrate talent, improve standards and, as a consequence, create greater interest among fans. The players union, as one might expect, will agree to nothing that means cutting jobs. Another deadlock.

Before every All-Star game there is a 'Home Run Derby', in which the game's greatest sluggers try to hit as many balls as possible out of the park, as far as possible. This week Sammy Sosa launched five homers over 500ft - an athletic achievement comparable, say, to Ben Johnson running the 100m in under 9.9. Presumably, this exact thought was on the mind of the TV commentator who made an unguarded comment about Sosa's statuesque physique on air during coverage of the derby. Sosa has consistently denied using steroids, but his record-breaking achievements in recent years, along with those of Barry Bonds, who broke the home run record last year, have led many fans, former players and even current players to conclude that steroid use is rampant in baseball.

The owners say testing would restore some of the game's lost credibility. The players' union believes testing would be an infringement of its members constitutional rights to privacy. On this, as on everything else, it seems the twain are as far apart as the distance travelled by one of Sammy's monstrous homers. Little wonder that, when ordinary baseball fans are asked whose side they are on, the billionaire owners' or the millionaire players', they shake their heads and choose neither.

They were shaking their heads again last week, more in disbelief than disappointment. Ted Williams was regarded by many as the greatest hitter of a baseball who ever lived. In a 21-year career (1939-60) with the Boston Red Sox he hit 521 home runs (this figure would have approached 700 had he not spent five peak years as a pilot in the Marines), was the last player to have a batting average over .400 (.406 in 1941) and is the oldest player to to have won the batting title - when he was 40. He died earlier this month aged 83 and his son has had his father cryogenically frozen in the hope of defrosting him in 2050 and selling his DNA to any baseball club on the lookout for a world-class hitter. A growing number of those fans are beginning to wonder if the game will still be around in 2050.

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