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One nice thing about the baseball strike is that the great American pastime has been moved from the sports pages to the business section, where it belongs.
However, I've missed a few angles in the business analysis. I know what the players want, more money, and what the owners want, more money. The argument is not over whether baseball is worth the vast sums it attracts, but over how those vast sums should be divvied up.
I also know about the financial impacts on souvenir vendors, tee-shirt printers, scorecard sales agents, groundskeepers and similar collateral enterprises.
But what of the sales tax money going to Coors Field? Can't Doug Bruce find some way to rebate it? Here are thousands of people making $18,000 a year, all generously contributing to provide a playground for a couple dozen young men making $1.2 million a year, and if they're not going to use this playground, why keep paying for it?
And what is the effect of the strike on the news media?
How much did the Rocky Mountain News spend to be the
official newspaper of the Colorado Rockies,
and how
much of that investment is lost for this year? Those TV
stations that broadcast games and air the Don Baylor Show
-- what's this costing them? How much income did the Post
expect from the Baseball Monday special section, and how
much will it decline as the strike wears on and people lose
interest?
The loss-of-interest factor should be the real concern of everyone involved in promoting and profiting from Major League Baseball.
Take a bunch of guys fooling around with a ball and a stick. Except for the participants, nobody cares, and rightly so. But add a century of hyperbolic prose about heroism and symbolism and civic pride and fabricated Abner Doubleday mythology and fathers playing catch with their sons, and you get an industry.
In short, the only reason most of us pay any attention to baseball is that we've been told that it's important. If our news media devoted the same attention to horseshoes, you'd have heard of one Allen Baptist of Eagle, Colo., who returned last week from the world tournament in Syracuse, N.Y., with a championship.
We'd have all been glued to our TV sets while color commentators talked about wind gusts, the position of the sun relative to the player's eyes, clay pits vs. sand, the tension of having to top the opponent's pair of ringers, possible effects of the low altitude of Syracuse on a high-altitude player, the difference between formal and informal horseshoes in scoring for leaners, possible crowd distractions, various grips, differing calk angles, etc.
That suggests one solution for some losses caused by the baseball strike. Sports writers are a creative lot -- they have to be, since they've always got to find new ways to describe essentially the same daily routine.
So they could find some other sport, and start telling people it's important. After a while, people will believe that the new sport is something vital, rather than a mere fabrication, and we could make an industry out of horseshoes, volleyball, caber-tossing, gladiators or dozens of other activities.
However, this would require a great deal of collusion. It wouldn't work if one TV network decided on water polo and another on jai alai, while one newspaper sports department made javelin-tossing important as another promoted rowing. When they met to decide on a summer sport to replace baseball, they would be subject to financial pressure, and besides, the Department of Justice might take a dim view of the meeting.
However, we've got to do something. Without Rockies games to keep people in the city, more city people will visit the real Rockies.
The mountains were already crowded this summer before the ballplayers struck. On every trip out of town, I've run into bumper-to-bumper traffic, even late at night in the middle of the week when you used to be able to count on open roads.
Friends tell me that fishing has become a communal activity and that developed campsites are often filled before noon, and I don't know how long it's been since I saw a motel vacancy sign after sundown. Cafes and diners offer long lines at lunch and dinner time.
Even walking downtown has become difficult, with all these tourists taking pictures of old brick buildings. Some glared at me last week for getting in the way, and were not mollified when I offered to pose for only $5, assuring them that I was a genuine mountain resident who would add authenticity to their photo album.
Now, there's nothing wrong with people arriving in central Colorado with money and departing without it. But what used to be a trickle has turned into a flow that strains our roads and commercial structure, and with the baseball strike, the flow be a flood by Labor Day.
Every day, 50,000 people who would have harmlessly congregated at Mile High Stadium might take to the hills. More highway congestion, more campsite crowding, fewer private fishing holes, longer lines everywhere we turn.
Getting a major-league team in Denver was a clever way to keep the mountains from being loved to death. If baseball refuses to perform this important job, we'll have to find something else, even if it does involve conspiracy, collusion and bribery of sportswriters.
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