Originally published July 9, 1996, by Mike Barnicle for The Boston Globe
PHILADELPHIA Bill Giles who sure is older than the stadium where his team, the Phillies, plays its baseball, yet happens to be a lot younger in spirit than most men half his age stood yesterday in the locker room where National League AllStars will dress to play the American League this evening in a sport that is struggling to regain momentum and popularity. Major League baseball, stocked with talent, needs kids to survive.
“Someone pointed out to me recently that I had spent my whole life in baseball,” Bill Giles was saying. “But I told them, `Not yet, I haven’t.’ ”
Giles owns the Philadelphia Phillies, a club with a proud history. He has done everything there is to do around the sport, other than mix mud for the balls, but he knows his game is surrounded by a rising level of danger. “We have to market this product and attract the young fan again,” he said.
His father, Warren Giles, was president of the National League at a time when baseball had absolutely no competition for the minds or money of sports fans.
Television had yet to establish itself as a dominant force in American life. There was no cable, no MTV, no Sega, satellite, GameBoy, Nintendo or computers, and there sure wasn’t a parade of athletes being paid salaries that ensured they did not have to care what fan or owner thought about their abilities or their attitudes.
“Thirty years ago, players cared more about the game, because they knew more about the game,” Jim Fregosi, the Phillies manager, said yesterday. “Today’s athletes are bigger and stronger and they’re certainly richer but they don’t necessarily know how to play baseball as well as we did three decades back.”
“That’s because we played more back then,” Fregosi added. “We played baseball from morning till night. These guys today don’t play the sport nearly as much, and a lot of them don’t have the respect for it that older players have.
“That’s baseball’s biggest job. Get kids playing baseball again, instead of soccer.”
The manager stood behind the batting cage at Veterans Stadium as the National League took batting practice in tropical heat. Ripples of warmth rose from the artificial turf as Jeff Bagwell and Chipper Jones took turns knocking the ball into seats filled with spectators who had come out just to see players practice.
There were a ton of kids on the playing surface surrounding both dugouts, and ballplayers had to run a gantlet to get to the cage. Most stopped to sign balls and caps held in outstretched hands by youngsters with huge eyes: Mo Vaughn, Frank Thomas, Ken Griffey Jr. and Cal Ripken stood and signed, while Brady Anderson, Wade Boggs and a few others pretended the kids were not there as they pushed past them, never even bothering with eye contact.
Everyone knows baseball has a problem except the players. There is an arrogance about too many of them that threatens the stability of the best game ever invented.
Football is fine, but it is difficult for a child to truly identify with somebody as big as the World Trade Center. Basketball has a similiar problem: It’s played by millionaires who are 7 feet tall, while hockey, with the nicest professional athletes, is only on the verge of becoming more than a regional sport.
Baseball, however, is democracy disguised by bat and ball. You don’t have to be terribly big or terribly fast. It is a game kids can still play with a parent years after Little League memories have been magnified in the rearview mirror of imagination. Almost anybody can play catch.
But to keep on liking this wonderful game it is necessary to like those who play it for a living. Sadly, if there are indeed a whole lot of likable athletes in the major leagues, they are doing a wonderful job of hiding their warmth behind a wall of big money and incredible indifference.
Suddenly, Albert Belle came up the steps of the dugout and onto the hot turf. The begging children looked like pygmies alongside the bulk of the Indians’ outfielder, but their polite and they were truly polite pleas did not matter, as Belle spoke to a single friend while ignoring everything and everyone.
There, with all his talent, as well as his hideous lack of civility, Albert Belle was a metaphor for professional baseball: blessed with ability but totally unconcerned that those who walk away shaking their heads, their view of a great game warped by basic bad manners, might find something better to do than come back to the game.
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