In our youth, February seemed the longest month of the year. The month just dragged, especially toward the end, for February was the time when baseball seemed tantalizingly close yet very distant. The month began with the knowledge that within two or three weeks the first reports would begin filtering back from spring training. Yet even the first box scores seemed but sketchy dispatches from distant battles. The real season, the season we could see on TV and experience, at long last, in person, was still more than a month away–beyond March to April.
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Baseball’s off-season has been so eventful this winter–especially in these parts–it would seem the last thing anyone needs to do is drum up interest in the sport by restocking the hot-stove league. Yet for some reason we’ve been left strangely cold, and it doesn’t appear that general interest in the game has risen much either. The actual end of the strike–which should have been a cause of great celebration–came off as the climax of a tawdry, sweeps-month, made-for-TV movie. What? The prime villain suddenly unmasks himself–even to his closest allies–as a greedy, self-interested manipulator, at which point all concerned come abruptly to their senses and do the right thing? Not that old denouement! Yet this, indeed, was what happened. White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, after quashing the late-season deal struck by the owners’ negotiator and the players’ Donald Fehr, signed Albert Belle to a record five-year, $55 million contract–at which point the other owners caved in and overwhelmingly agreed to the same exact contract they had just rejected. Anything seemed like a turn toward sanity after that.
At first it seemed the best of all possible worlds for Sox fans. Reinsdorf got his comeuppance, baseball got a new labor pact, and the Sox got Belle to bat behind Frank Thomas. Talk about a murderers row; there hasn’t been a back-to-back set like that since Roger Maris won two consecutive Most Valuable Player awards hitting in front of Mickey Mantle. Yet the deal had its price. Alex Fernandez was set free when the owners granted retroactive service time to players for the course of the actual strike in late ’94, and the Cuban emigre immediately signed with the Florida Marlins in his adopted hometown of Miami. Last year Fernandez had finally stepped forward as the team’s acknowledged pitching ace, a difficult role every team must fill if it expects to compete for first place.
If the Sox decide to jettison Phillips, they’ll be faced with having to bat second baseman Ray Durham as the leadoff man. That’s another pressure-packed position–much like staff ace–that requires as much mental toughness as talent. Again, is he ready? It won’t matter how well Thomas and Belle hit if no one’s on base ahead of them. At this point we wouldn’t pick the Sox to win their division, much less the championship–though the best thing about hot-stove-league speculation is that, after all, it’s early.
So while this should be a time of optimism and renewal for baseball fans, it turns out to be a time of dread on both sides of town. Isn’t it appropriate that, just as the Cubs and Sox both lack an ace, baseball continues to lack a real commissioner? And with the Cubs scheduled to make the trip to Comiskey in June for the first regular-season interleague play between the two teams, word now is the Sox are considering a deal that would require anyone wanting tickets to those games to buy them as a package with three other games. The Sox’ marketing department has worked overtime the last couple of seasons in an attempt to make the team more “fan-friendly”; then some greedy exec comes along with that plan. Someone should have made a requirement that if the team bid on Belle it had to bid on three quality pitchers as well.
