Pro football is still king, a situation that annoys us baseball junkies and should catch the attention of leaders within our former national pastime. The NFL will stage two conference championships Sunday, to be followed by Super Bowl XXXV, America’s greatest single sports orgy. If any of those games isn’t memorable, football fans will vent because they expect competitive balance.
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But complaining is better than acquiescing, which is all baseball fans can do with a flawed system that lacks a level playing field. About 20 minutes after the New York Yankees earned their third consecutive World Series, they bought the best pitcher available, Mike Mussina, and at a bargain.
Then the Texas Rangers tripled the stakes on Alex Rodriguez, and reaction was twofold. A lot of people thought it crazy, and a lot of other people took the binge as another clue about baseball’s destiny–the mother of all taffy pulls between management and labor after the 2001 season.
That is the essence of modern hot-stove discussion. When baseball should be warming up winter by creating interest and anticipation, the prevailing theme concerns imminent war. Meanwhile, Commissioner Bud Selig, his hands cuffed by special-interest owners, floats his plan for a draft that will feed warm bodies from successful to impoverished teams.
Unfortunately, the proposal is as empty as baseball’s vain attempt at revenue-sharing, whereby haves donate spare change to have-nots. The player-relief concept is similarly feeble. The Yankees would still protect their best athletes, and the Expos would pick talent from a pool as shallow as the rubber one in your back yard.
Against this stacked deck there is the NFL, which crowned new champions in all six divisions. In the last three seasons just two teams have won their division twice, and only Jacksonville repeated. Say what you will about the NFL’s mechanisms–salary cap, divvying up the TV spoils equally, gerrymandering next year’s schedule to assist last year’s downtrodden. They work.
The mere possibility of a New York-Oakland Super Bowl speaks volumes. The Giants operate in the country’s largest market, the Raiders in a smallish one. Yet if both advance Sunday, the Raiders will be favored to win it all. You have to have something stronger than tobacco in your pipe to concoct such a scenario in baseball’s landscape.
The A’s of Oakland have rebuilt nicely after dealing away slugger Mark McGwire because of fiscal exhaustion and might even win their division in 2001. But long range they haven’t got a chance of staying with the Yankees, unless baseball adopts controls to encourage a sense of parity.
The NFL has its problems. The police blotter bleeds, as do TV ratings, although the league does rather well considering there is no team in the No. 2 city, Los Angeles, and a cadaver in No. 3, Chicago. Somehow the NFL captures us. What other sport snags headlines by hiring Dennis Miller?
Sunday’s story lines are fascinating, if not a public-relations windfall. The Raiders are run by Al Davis, who beat the NFL like a rug in court while moving from Oakland to Los Angeles back to Oakland. After Indianapolis stole the Colts, Baltimore stole the team belonging to Art Modell, the cur without conscience who left Cleveland. The New York Giants play in New Jersey, the Minnesota Vikings threaten to leave for San Antonio. Baseball frowns on portable franchises, but stands perilously still on other issues.
One can only imagine what would be had Marvin Miller, who built the baseball union into a powerhouse, instead been hired by the football players, who routinely caved in when negotiations turned tough. Or if NFL owners were as narrow-minded about their industry as are baseball owners.
Somehow the astute NFL even made it work in Cleveland, where bereaved fans got a new team, new stadium and new Browns in exchange for an established administration that had lost its way. Wonder if that could happen in another big city where passion for pro football is better than the product.