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A couple of Saturdays ago, I watched Jim Thome smash a two-run, pinch-hit homer in the bottom of the 11th to give Cleveland a 5-4 come-from-behind victory over Detroit.
It was what baseball is all about.
Thome is a rarity in the game, a legitimate superstar who has played for no other team during his nine seasons as a Major Leaguer. He's played in three All Star games, five division series, three American League championships and two World Series.
He has a lifetime batting average of .284, 233 home runs, 1,053 hits and 685 runs batted in. He's been on the disabled list just three times in his career and boasts a .981 fielding percentage at first and third.
He's a gamer, and he could be making a lot more money than he is by venturing out into the free-agent market. The kid from Peoria has taken his place with Larry Doby, Al Rosen, Rocky Colavito, Bob Feller and all the other Tribe greats in the hearts of the Cleveland fans.
Hell, on the day of his pinch-hit homer, they gave out Jim Thome bobble head dolls at Jacobs Field even though he wasn't in the starting lineup, adding to the storybook quality of his feat. Thome epitomizes all the things that are great about the game of baseball. But there are fewer and fewer players like him. While a number could match him statistically, not many care about the game itself so much as they do about what's in it for them.
This and many other problems facing baseball are addressed in Fair Ball, the first book by legendary sports commentator Bob Costas. It should be required reading for every fan of the game.
For anyone who hasn't been paying attention, baseball is in a lot of trouble compared to other team sports such as football and basketball. The specter of another strike or lockout looms in 2002, which would be the third such event since 1984.
Every spring, fans in great baseball towns like Kansas City, Minneapolis and Pittsburgh enter the season with utter certainty that their teams have absolutely no chance whatsoever of making it into the World Series. And every autumn, fans all across the country can rest assured that New York--the Yankees or the Mets--Atlanta, Cleveland or any of the other top half-dozen payroll teams will face each other in October.
Alex Rodriguez's contract with Texas alone is worth more than a couple of entire franchises, and the Rangers still aren't going anywhere. And for every A-Rod, there are a dozen or more players earning the league minimum who will end up selling used cars after they retire.
The owners of the big market teams are loathe to share the wealth of local television and gate revenues with their counterparts in the smaller markets. Costas points out that while the Yankees took in $133.5 million from these sources in 1999, the Montreal Expos got just $27.1 million. What kind of "competition" can there be when some teams can afford to spend five times as much as others on talent?
To address these inequities, Costas proposes raising league minimums, imposing a salary cap on superstar players and instituting revenue sharing to even the playing field between the richest and poorest teams. Pointing to the NBA, where teams like San Antonio, Sacramento, Portland and Salt Lake City can compete with and even contend against New York, Los Angeles, Cleveland and Chicago, he chastises the men of baseball--both players and owners--for allowing the present situation to develop.
The novelty of interleague play wore off about as quickly as it took to see your team play some meaningless series down the stretch, and the abomination of the wild card "race" virtually has destroyed the genuine thrill of what used to be the pennant race.
But sadly, Costas' sound and well-reasoned arguments will fall on deaf ears. Three- and four-hour games have become the rule rather than the exception, and it's not unusual for teams to score a combined 20 runs in any given contest.
Some things you just shouldn't mess with and, as any longtime fan can tell you, baseball is one of them.