Oh, I know! It’s the hissing fuse the baseball players just lit by setting an August 30 strike date. Look, guys, just because I ran away with the office football pool last year (even though I really don’t like football much), you don’t have to put me in a chauffeur-driven limousine and carry me off to their camp!
The ’81 strike hit when I in was between the fandom of my childhood and of now. I was too busy flunking out of college and playing in a band to notice.
The ’94 strike hurt. A lot.
I am a Red Sox fan, so I know baseball pain. Still, this wasn’t legitimate. This wasn’t a bonehead manager move, a bad umpire call or a stupid fielding error. This wasn’t Buckner. This wasn’t Lucky Dent.
I had just moved to Florida–far away from my daily dose of Red Sox–and was just warming up to the idea of watching baseball as a whole. Frank Thomas and Ken Griffey could still hit. Kirby Puckett was still playing (I miss him). Greg Maddux was 16-6. Ken Hill (remember him?) was 16-5. Manny Ramirez, Raul Mondesi and Cliff Floyd were rookies. Cincinnati was in first place (sorry Grump)…
But I got over it. Enough to start watching again. Enough to see that not all of the players were rich, ego-maniacal twits. There was Cal and Kirby and Mo and Pedro and Sosa and McGwire and Giambi and Nomar…It was going to take something more than a strike and some missed playoffs (that the Sox weren’t going to be in anyway) to make me forget about Yaz and Fisk and Tiant.
This may be that something.
It definately is for me, If they go…so do I, and I won’t be back…
Oh, I’ll be some angry, as well. Yup, I’ll join in on the bluster. But the real problem is this… The Players and the Owners know the fans are sheep. They will come back, eventually. Yes, there will be a big attendance loss 1st season, and a lesser one the season after that, etc, but we, the fans, will watch, or look at the newspaper or internet, and eventually get hooked again. Dammit. (these comments are echoing from 1995, the last time this crap happened… I’m back, and so are you. And they know it. And it pisses me off that we can’t help ourselves with it.)