As the nation settled in for what may be the longest baseball strike in more than a decade, owners and players were betting that their mostly white, suburban fans would flock back to ballparks whenever Greedstock ‘94 finally ended. But getting urban fans to come out may be harder than ever. With programs such as new youth leagues in 32 cities, baseball had just started to lure black and Latino fans turned off by lousy marketing and rising ticket prices. Now there’s the added perception that players would rather walk off the field than settle for salaries that pay more in a day than some of those fans make in a year. “I don’t think [the strike] changes what we’re doing,” says Kathleen Francis, Major League Baseball’s new head of market development. “But it doesn’t help.”
The strike seems headed for extra innings. At least one team has already held its year-end meeting; others have sent their staffs on extended vacations. Federal mediators brought the players and owners to the bargaining table last week for the first time since the standoff began, but the two-day talks featured enough sniping to make teamsters’ negotiations look touchy-feely. In Congress, where opportunities to exploit public outrage rarely go unnoticed, lawmakers vowed to revisit the owners’ exemption from antitrust laws and considered a bill that would give fans control of a new oversight board. But few people were talking baseball in the mythical South Bronx, where the first-place Yankees sell an estimated 85 percent of their tickets to fans outside the city.
The strike could be a dry run for this neighborhood – the Yankees’ owner, George Steinbrenner, has been threatening to move the team to New Jersey. But many of the children who live around the stadium say baseball is a boring game that’s mostly for white people anyway. “Kids a generation before them would have been agonizing over a strike – a generation before that, weeping and wailing in the streets,” says Bronx borough president Fernando Ferrer. He worries that the standoff will alienate not just the locals but fans in Washington, too; he has been fighting to get the stadium area included in a federal em-powerment zone to help re-build the neighborhood’s tattered economy.
It’s almost a proverb among community leaders that black children gravitate toward basketball because it is a skillfully marketed sport that can be played with a ball and a blacktop. That doesn’t explain why the strike seems only mildly upsetting to the Dominicans, Puerto Ricans and other Latinos who make up a majority in the Bronx. Baseball is a religion in much of the Caribbean; Puerto Rico alone has launched a skyful of major-league stars, from Roberto Clemente to Roberto Alomar. Many of the South Bronx Latinos say they’re avid fans, but few can shell out $14 for a ticket. “I make $7 an hour,” says Luis Rivera, 40, a cook who coaches a neighborhood peewee team. “I have four kids. If I go to the stadium, I can only take one.” It costs $29 a month just to watch most of the games on cable TV, and parts of the neighborhood still aren’t even wired for cable.
Instead, Latino immigrants have imported their own baseball – and some say it’s better. Owners in the Pancho Coimbre Athletic League, named after a Puerto Rican star in the old Negro Leagues, put up $5,000 each to field teams of dazzling young players from around the city. A training ground for big-leaguers like the Blue Jays’ Devon White, Pancho Coimbre attracts hundreds of fans ev-ery weekend in Central Park. Its 71-year-old president, Jose Calderon, says the striking pros might learn something from organizations like his. “This league’s only for one purpose – to play ball,” he says from his beach chair behind home plate. “We have no drugs. No fights. If you want to have a beer after the game, you can have it. But not in uniform. If I see that, I’ll suspend them.” In Puerto Rico, Calderon says, the pros stay active in youth leagues and teach kids to play. Here the players demand even more money – while Calderon’s teams play on dirt and gravel. “In Yankee Stadium, we’ve got Latin guys making millions of dollars,” says Lueis Vazquez, who at 34 is one of the league’s retired legends. “What do they do with it?”
That irony hasn’t been en-tirely lost on baseball, nor has the potential cost. This year alone the major leagues helped rebuild 15 inner-city fields. But if a prolonged strike reinforces baseball’s image as the game of millionaires, those ges-tures may seem as hollow as Albert Belle’s bat. “It’s politics,” says Danin Johnson, 27, talking about the strike as he takes a jump shot a few feet from the game’s most storied stadium. “Brothers ain’t gonna lose sleep over it.” Maybe the sultans of summer should.
