FORT MYERS, Fla. -- Now we know that while striking major-league baseball players can talk the talk, they won't walk the walk.
Replacement pickets. That's the ticket.
The players association says it plans to set up picket lines at spring training and regular-season games. But don't expect to see players carrying signs or singing songs of solidarity.
As Gene Orza, legal counsel for the players, put it, "I don't think you should anticipate there will be players on the picket lines. But I think you should anticipate there will be picket lines."
Great. There's never been anything normal about this strike, not when the strikers are making millions. And now they can't even be bothered to walk their own picket line.
It's like when Joan Baez sang at Woodstock, "From San Diego up to Maine in every mine and mill, where working men defend lTC their rights, it's there you'll find Joe Hill."
But you won't find right-handed pitcher Kenny Hill.
Why no players on the lines? Because it turns out that the fat cats are fraidy cats.
"There's a security problem involved," explained Orza. "The players would just be out there exposed. There might be an irate fan out there. And it can tend to make for a less-than-serious atmosphere."
Gee, isn't it a shame that picket lines aren't fun?
Again, the players have demonstrated how out-of-touch they are with the rest of the world. Pregnant telephone operators and school librarians can walk the line. Even weeny newspaper reporters have done it time and again. Five years ago, a striking Greyhound bus driver was hit by a bus and killed. Guess he was "out there exposed." Too bad he couldn't have sent somebody else to picket for him.
During the strike of 1982, NFL players walked their own picket lines. Major-league umpires carried signs outside ballparks in 1979 and 1984. But the baseball players will find replacement picketers to strike the replacement games. Yikes.
Wonder who'll they'll get to carry signs? Maybe they'll send their valets. Maybe they'll hire striking schoolteachers and give the educators a chance to get some sun. Maybe they could enlist the help of Johnny Cash. He walks the line.
If the idea of replacement players makes the fans giggle, the notion of replacement picketers makes union leaders laugh out loud.
Charlie Ruiter, business agent of IUE Local 201 in Lynn, Mass., chuckled when he heard Orza's remarks and said, "That's ridiculous, who are they gonna send? Their wives? It's their fight, it's their argument. They should be out there taking their fight to the people. If they don't show up on the picket lines, they're really putting their cause in deep trouble."
Once again, the players want us to consider them a union when it's convenient -- even though they are unlike any union in the world (name another union that had members carving out multimillion-dollar deals with management while on strike). They want other unions to honor their strike, even though they never have honored anybody else's strike (umpires, electricians, airlines, etc.). And now they're telling us that they can't walk picket lines because of a "security problem."
Security problems? Don't they realize that, historically, most picket line violence is committed by the picketers? Does Orza think his players aren't tough enough? John Franco and Bobby Bonilla already have made threats against anyone who would cross. And Roger ("I know where you live") Clemens can be intimidating. Why should the players have to hire replacement picketers? Exactly what are they afraid of?
Unlike striking meat packers, the players aren't likely to be facing down Dobermans or long-range rifles while they march around City of Palms Park or Fenway Park.
When you think about it, the players would make perfect picketers. They are good at throwing things and they are the sultans of spit. Expectoration always has been the weapon of choice on picket lines.
Union activists in Boston aren't surprised that players in the salary stratosphere won't walk the line.
"It's awful hard to get guys in three-piece suits who make $3 million in any kind of a picket line," said Domenic Bozzotto, president of Boston's Hotel Workers Local 26. "If they really want people not to go into the park, it seems to me that if they held court outside of those parks it would be more effective to have them out there."
The players have a decision to make. Are they a union or a millionaires club? Can they, like thousands of union workers before them, talk and walk at the same time?