Havre de Grace.--It's a truism that Baltimore's a great sports town, and a corollary thereto that the city is suffering great deprivation these days without any so-called big-league teams of its own in action.
But while it's fair to say that the departures of the Colts to the Irsaydome and the Orioles to the picket lines have pinched municipal tax revenues and cost a few local people their jobs, the overall impact has been a lot softer than the economic-development party line suggests. In fact, though they usually won't say so in public, a lot of people think the city's better off.
It's better off psychologically, too. Big-league sports these days represent much of what's most repugnant about American life in the 1990s. The competition on the field is brutal, occasionally drug-enhanced, joyless and sterile. The players are self-absorbed, the owners ego-maniacal. Their "labor" squabbles are preposterous. Money and media rule their glittery world.
Residents of the communities the teams purportedly represent are urged to demonstrate their civic spirit by buying over-priced seats and skyboxes. But this support buys no loyalty in return. The bond that used to connect team and city is now only a cynical illusion, maintained as long as it's convenient and not a moment more.
In many respects this was a pleasant fall without major-league baseball, and the prospect of a similarly uninterrupted spring and summer in 1995 is not without appeal. Many former baseball fans have found that there are scores of alternative ways to spend one's spare time, and as the strike goes on others will make this happy discovery as well. If it ends, they'll find it easier to stay away.
With regard to football, perhaps Peter Angelos or some other home-town money bags will purchase somebody else's team and bring it -- in Mayflower moving vans? -- back to Baltimore, graciously allowing the taxpayers of the city and state to provide a new downtown playground for it. But it's a pipe dream to think that a new football team would reverse the decline of Baltimore as a livable community. At best, it might divert public attention from it for a little while.
The problem with big-league sports these days has little to do with the sports themselves, and everything to do with the bigness of the institutions that run them. The great appeal of Jim Speros' Canadian Football League venture in Baltimore was in its smallness, its scrappy coach-class character, and in the sense that owner, players and community shared a common interest in making the experiment work.
In their arrogant and impersonal bigness, American professional sports at the national level have begun to exhibit the same symptoms as the national government, and may require a similar cure.
Unless they make some dramatic adjustments in style and attitude, big-time sports may suddenly find themselves expendable rather than irreplaceable. Americans are a patient people, but they can tire with startling speed of being treated with contempt by people who forget who ultimately pays the bills. Ask Tom Foley about that -- or even Parris Glendening.
Bigness, as the dinosaurs discovered, has its drawbacks. This is true in sports, in politics and in private industry. Human institutions can't be infinitely expanded without losing many of the qualities that made them acceptable to those who relied on them.
Havre de Grace, with just under 9,000 residents, isn't much on bigness. But it has a tradition of taking its baseball very seriously. A couple of generations back, box scores of the Susquehanna League's semi-pro games were front-page news in the local papers. When Havre de Grace and Perryville played, local pride was seriously on the line.
The fields weren't major-league quality, but they were pretty good. The caliber of play wasn't major-league, but the intensity certainly was. And although the Susquehanna League's gone now, more's the pity, the old baseball intensity lingers on, focused nowadays on an outstanding Little League program, a classy amateur league for older kids, and of course on softball.
At these games, most people know one another. There's a bond that links players and spectators, coaches and umpires, volunteer groundskeepers and snack-bar attendants. Not so long ago, there was a similar bond in major-league cities, but the owners, the players, the agents, the lawyers and the other parasitic pilot fish that swarm around the sport have done away with that, probably for good.
Whatever happens in Camden Yards and Yankee Stadium, whether or not the over-reaching big-leaguers ever take the field again, baseball will endure at the community level. That's where it got its start, and where it's protected from the insidious corrosions of bigness.
So some of us at least can cheerfully sing -- let's stay home from the O-zone, let's stay home from the crowd. Forget the Chablis and Crackerjack, we don't care if they never come back . . .
Peter A. Jay is a writer and farmer.