As owners, networks and agents raise their usual battle cries, a gap seems to be growing in the most pivotal relationship in baseball: the one between player and fan. Annoyed by big salaries, surprising trades, high-priced tickets and frequent drug charges, fans regard players with as much caution as affection. And in New York this summer, the consequences are obvious: attendance at Mets games is down more than 25 percent from 1988, and TV ratings have slumped, too. One reason, says Chris (Mad Dog) Russo, who hosts a WFAN call-in show: fans “just don’t feel as close to the player.”
Of course, you could chalk up the angst to the Mets’ losing ways. Fair-weather fans are nothing new, and by Friday the club was 15 1/2 games out of first place. But consider the Mets’ maiden season, 1962, when one losing streak lasted 17 games and they ended the season 60 1/2 games out. Fans were so loyal the players at their last home game went out on the field carrying placards that spelled out: WE LOVE YOU METS FANS TOO!
But as baseball has become as much business as pleasure, fans have been turned into “customers.” In 1962 the Mets won over fans just by filling the void left by the Dodgers and Giants. In an era of $15 tickets and $2.35 hot dogs, fans have a shorter fuse. Besides, says Russo, they don’t want to be treated like “clients” but “like human beings, who love their team.”
The most constant complaint, of course, is players’ huge salaries and short-lived loyalties. It’s not a ball game, “it’s a stock market,” grouses a Queens resident who lives only minutes from Shea but hasn’t been to a game in years. While some statistics suggest otherwise, fans are convinced that players are traded more often these days. Jim Hoag, a Long Island pastor, thinks his two boys don’t have time to develop the kind of bond he once had with Roger Maris or Mickey Mantle. Those guys were Hoag’s heroes; he calls today’s players “mercenaries.” And while fans were never happy with a player in a slump, now they gripe at him, not with him. “You see a guy miss a play, you feel like, hey, he’s making $5 million, he should have got that,” says one Shea skeptic.
Not surprisingly, Beverly Hills-based agent Dennis Gilbert-who represents $29 million man Bobby Bonilla, among others-defends such salaries. No one complains about Michael Jackson’s millions, he says; why shouldn’t Bonilla be paid what he’s worth? But a star is a star, and a baseball player used to be’ well, the guy who played out your sandlot dreams right down there on the diamond. And fans believe that big money changes attitudes. “If someone hits a grounder to the shortstop,” says Cheryl Watters with disgust, “they don’t even run it out.”
With the prospect of expansion teams drawing on the stable of players, fans worry that the game will deteriorate even more. “They don’t have enough good players as it is,” rails a Brooklyn cabbie. Nor do marketing ploys make up for players’ flaws. At Shea there are 25 to 30 giveaway days a season, from “Thermos night” to “beach-towel day.” But kids complain that players have shooed them away when they ask for autographs.
A winning team could easily turn things around. Radio’s Russo believes that fans always come back, just as they did after the Black Sox scandal of 1919 and the strike of 1981. But owners had better pay attention to all those empty seats. Maybe they could start with the music. Even as the Mets rallied in the sixth last Wednesday, the song on the public-address system wasn’t exactly uplifting. “Bye bye love, bye bye happiness” sang Simon and Garfunkel.
