Is baseball's democracy dead?

By Brian Algra Sports Central Columnist

Although ex-Padres, Phillies, and White Sox star John Kruk was a lifetime .300 hitter and a cancer-conquering World Series hero, his most lasting legacy to the game will likely be his reply to the schoolmarmish woman who once criticized him for drinking beer and smoking in the clubhouse: "I ain't no athlete, lady," he opined, "I'm a baseball player."

In many ways, of course, Kruk's retort provides grist to the schoolmarming mill -- among other things, it has often been cited as damning evidence of the difference between baseball-playing slobs and the paragons of physicality who compete in other major sports. But for all of its ugly implications, Kruk's observation also conveys a great deal of what, historically, has been baseball's own peculiar beauty, and the reason for its tremendous popularity.

That is: it's never been a sport reserved for the freakishly fast and outlandishly huge human anomalies we now tend to think of as "athletes," but a sport in which success has traditionally been open to "normal" people of any size, shape and (usually) color.

Unlike basketball or football, its superstars haven't needed to resemble comic-book mutants, but have looked instead like neighbors, or like friends and family. Kenny Lofton, for instance, reminds you of the kid who used to run a paper route on weekends; Orel Hershiser calls to mind that nice but nerdy storekeeper who used to let the old folks shop on credit; and late Yankee manager Casey Stengel was the spitting image of a dozing warehouse watchman.

Even folks who've never played a lick of baseball in their lives have been able to look at heroes like these and feasibly say -- in a way which surely doesn't apply to power forwards or prototype quarterbacks -- "hey, that could be me." Baseball's pantheon has always been created in the image of its fans; and its chief deities have always looked, in short, like ourselves.

Until relatively recently, this spirit of community applied as much to the pocketbooks as to the faces of Major League players and fans. In fact, although today's financial excesses have made it difficult to believe, most of last century's biggest baseball names weren't paid much more than the rest of their countrymen. Mickey Mantle might have been able to order the filet mignon instead of the New York strip, and Willie Mays might have been able to afford a bit more chrome for the trim on his Fairlane, but differences like these were essentially cosmetic, and, if anything, fostered admiration and ambition rather than disgruntlement and dismay.

Not even the fallout from the Curt Flood case of 1970 managed to clear out the ballparks: free agency certainly enabled a few select players to trade in their workaday ways for the lifestyles of the rich and famous, but fans were willing to look the other way -- so long as their faces weren't rubbed in the resulting imbalance.

All this talk of food and Fords and modest free agency probably sounds like a lot of pointless nostalgia, and perhaps in fact it's nothing more than that. To wish, after all, for a return to the days of the reserve clause is only to wish, when all is said and done, for an older breed of injustice. It's not, then, for the actual clause that I mourn, but for the sense of complete physical and socioeconomic player-fan parity which came along with it. Who, I ask you, wouldn't welcome a resumption of the days when the old baseball byline of "that could be me" was supplemented by a faith in "swell, they live just like us?"

Alas, however, the financial imbroglio of 2002 has made it painfully obvious that, over the past decade, the notion of baseball players being "just like us" has grown into a full-fledged travesty. Forget filet mignon and extra chrome: now that billionaire owners and millionaire players are publicly squabbling over how best to squander the money they ultimately take from our pockets, the psychological distance between the sport and its enthusiasts seems to be yawning insurmountably.

What makes this even worse is the widespread assumption that, quite simply, baseball's leaders couldn't care less. And so in the current climate of economic downturn, when most of the country's citizens are grousing about a scarcity of spending money and a surplus of corporate scandals, the big leagues and their bickering, apathetic powers-that-be are rapidly becoming America's most visible single symbol of the gap between the rich and the rest of us.

It may be ridiculous to suggest -- by way of a solution -- that the golden boys of the game revert to playing for regular-guy wages, but it is nonetheless apparent that, should the sport continue on its present course, the beauty of "that could be me" will soon be drowned out by a fresh and unforgiving chorus of "those guys just aren't like us at all." In fact, such a reversal of fortune -- whereby baseball might come to stand for the alienation of the average American, rather than for his refuge from it -- already seems frighteningly nigh.

And should it come to pass, what then of baseball's Loftons, its Hershisers and its Stengels? Far from looking like paperboys, shopkeepers, and security guards, they will remind us of the stockbrokers, the book-cookers, and the villainous CEOs who have climbed to their fortunes on the backs of the disadvantaged.

It's a wee bit paranoid, I suppose, to tremble before such Hershiser-haunted premonitions of doom. But paranoid or not, it looks as though another strike could produce the final demise of what Charles A. Peverelly once called "the game ... best suited to the American temperament." That's right: the big leagues are dying, and there won't be too many people turning up at the funeral.

As America's changing "temperament" continues to draw her toward the clannish brutality of the NFL and NBA, and as baseball's own financial indignities progressively alienate its few remaining believers, more and more folks are flocking to sports like hockey and soccer, where the kinship of player and fan remains a palpable reality.

In the long run, however, baseball's nightmare scenario -- within which America's perishing national pastime might be forced to resurrect itself at the feet of games from the Great White North and the grand Old World -- could prove to be best for us all. Only then, perhaps -- only then, when fathers and boyfriends and bosses are taking their sons, their dates, and their workmates to summer evening soccer games -- only then will baseball set itself to win us back again. And only then, it seems, will we be ready to return.

Article courtesy of Sports Central.