Lincicome: It's about time to start crying for baseball
Reports from empty spring training fields are wistful and lyrical, sullen sighs from modest stadiums uncluttered by actual ballplayers ruining the romance of it all. This happens even when there are ballplayers stretching and scratching, unfailed and optimistic, free of winter and last place in the standings.
How could such a thing happen? No spring training, regular season games canceled, Opening Day menaced? Don't they know there's new grass on the field?
I have been guilty of this sort of thing myself, seeing in the fresh, green promise of spring, renewal and hope and all that sort of stuff.
In my mind I see lazy afternoons (day baseball in the spring), children asleep on the laps of mothers, there with husbands in loud shorts and knee socks keeping diligent score in ink, marking the magic code of generations.
I take reassurance in the backward K, convinced that if America's most important gift to the world is democracy, a close second has to be the box score.
While I know that larking off to Florida or Arizona is mostly a waste of time, an annual illusion, there are much worse ways to waste it. Sure, you can get a grouper sandwich or a quesadilla anywhere, but it is extra special when there's a warm breeze and runners on the corners.
None of it matters and it has never mattered more.
So, here I am lamenting the loss of spring - the metaphor, not the season - while baseball spoils our affection by acting greedy and stupid, not the first time nor the last.
The players want more and the owners want to keep more, a classic labor dispute. All that the two sides seem to agree on is more playoff teams and the designated hitter in both leagues, a ruinous bargain if ever there was one.
The owners would have us believe they are trying to save the game by getting spending under control. And the players are concerned that they not relinquish the future of shortstops yet unborn by allowing the owners to take back what they've already given away.
Two thirds of baseball team owners are new since the last serious labor disruption 28 years ago. All of the players are new to this, unhappy with a minimum wage of more than a half-million dollars.
Neither side seems anxious to resolve their differences. Lack of urgency is a benefit of not working. Ordinarily, you have to either get elected to public office or be a Kardashian for this to happen.
Maybe what this dispute could use is less courtesy and more pain. If Rob Manfred, or any of baseball's ownership, had to worry about a pulled oblique or the odd dislocation, they might talk a little more seriously.
This is an unequal contest between the players and the owners because the owners get to do what they already know how to do, which is own things, but the players don't get to do what they do, which is to hit and throw things.
Maybe the way to settle this entirely unnecessary dispute is to alternate the negotiating sites.
One day Manfred and his owners get to sit on soft furniture and drone on while waiters keep their glasses filled.
The next day, the owners have to put on silly pants and a batting helmet, and try to state their position on the luxury tax while taking a fastball under the chin.
Ah, they will figure it out. There will be an Opening Day. Maybe we will be there to see it.
That's the scary thing. Will we still care? About baseball, I mean.
We have cared less and less lately, the national pastime becoming elevator music, familiar and aggravating at the same time. And that's at its best. At its worst it is four-hour games with tedious pitching changes, batters readjusting every little uniform accoutrement between pitches - shrug, tug and tighten.
Teams trying not to win, infield shifts and bullpen closers, jumbo screens, warm beer and no parking. Now here we are regretting this threat to our displeasure.
No crying in baseball? OK. But there should be crying for baseball.