When a White House spokesman said last week that President Clinton would take a 40-ounce bat to both sides of the baseball strike in an effort to hasten a settlement, he used imagery that, however crude, was sure to satisfy baseball fans of all political stripes.
Few fans have slogged through this dispiriting and seemingly unending strike without thinking at least once that it would be a pleasure to see someone take a bat that big and whack some sense into the smug, petulant characters who stole the World Series and can't seem to agree on whether the Yankees belong in the American League, much less how to solve their dispute.
(Who would you have at the front of the line? How about Sandy Alderson? The normally erudite Oakland GM should be ashamed of himself for politicizing Cal Ripken's consecutive-games streak. It should be broken here, and he knows it should be broken here, but he lost his cool in the heat of the strike. Forty-ouncer, please!)
Clinton's aggressive attempt to end the strike is a no-lose political proposition, of course, provided he is indeed able to end it. For once, Republicans would be just as happy as Democrats to see him succeed. Baseball fans from McGovern to Limbaugh just want their game back. How they get it back doesn't matter.
But as much as Clinton can gain some badly needed public favor by saving baseball, I don't think that is his primary motivation this time.
Really.
The man is a serious sports fan, as we saw last spring watching him sweat with his Hogs during the NCAA basketball tournament. He knows about rotating zone defenses. He knows who is pitching well and who isn't (when baseball exists). He is a box score junkie. Given idle time and a talk show on his dial, he'd probably be "Bill from Washington," calling and spewing venom along with the other knucklehead fans.
You get the feeling that he surfs on over to "SportsCenter" more than his aides would be willing to admit.
Anyway, and maybe it is his common-man roots, he seems to understand that baseball is an integral component of the country's basic mental health, an American essential unlike any other, an extra member of millions of families from March to October. Thus, even though the game is a relatively small industry whose problems aren't worthy of his office's attention, its absence is high-level important because so many people's alignments were knocked out of whack last year. He speaks from experience, it seems.
And as he said last week, who better than a president/Big Fan to do something about it?
It's doubtful that George Bush would have acted as purposefully had he won in '92. Even though Bush played baseball in college, he no longer follows the majors with the Clinton-like, couch-potato passion that consumes so many Americans. Besides, Bush surely wouldn't have offered to take a 40-ouncer to an ownership group that includes his son, who owns the Texas Rangers.
But that's a moot point, because Clinton won in '92 and now he's steamed up about the strike. He set an arbitrary deadline to try to get things going. He reportedly pressured the National Labor Relations Board into forcing the owners to drop their imposed salary cap, ending the ridiculous prospect of a replacement season. Yet still, his threat to use the 40-ouncer hasn't stirred the sides closer to an agreement. Mediator William J. Usery said yesterday that today's deadline will not be met.
In other words, now we're about to find out just how hard Clinton really can swing that big bat.
Usery is going to present him with a proposed settlement today. What happens after that is unclear. Clinton doesn't have the power to impose a settlement by himself. But he can use Usery's recommendation as a basis for a special piece of legislation that, if passed by Congress and signed by Clinton, would impose a settlement. And it's not hard to see Congress wanting to share the baseball-saving headlines.
Other possibilities include the two sides' agreeing to binding arbitration or Congress' working to strip the owners' antitrust exemption or, well, who can tell at this point? There's always the chance that the threat of a mediated settlement would stir the two sides, particularly the owners, to move as far as they need to move.
In an interview with Newsday published yesterday, Clinton spoke of the strike in the past tense. "We were in danger of having a relatively small group of people take the season away," he said. As if that danger had passed.
He obviously hasn't spent any time with Bud Selig.
No, there is still work to be done. The strike has come down to "Clinton At The Bat," the famous, old poem given a sad, new twist. That the president decided to get involved is fortunate, for otherwise the owners would have sat on their stubborn principles until baseball became a grainy memory. This thing was going nowhere.
Maybe some Republicans are hoping Clinton strikes out, as mighty Casey did, but any real baseball fan wants only to see him make good on his promise to make enough contact with that 40-ouncer to bring back baseball. Perhaps the imagery is more appropriate of a hockey goon than a president. But a fan is a fan is a fan.