Are those the first thin cracks of sun we see through the cloud of gloom overhanging major league baseball?
After months of talk about a season of baseball with retread players, reality is setting in. Hard-line owners, who have been talking tough since last August, aren't backing down just yet, but that line in the sand they have drawn is getting fuzzier.
At least one club has separated its manager and coaches from replacement players in spring training, confining their work to bona fide minor leaguers. Another owner won't force his minor league players to cross the major league picket line. And then there's the Detroit Tigers' Sparky Anderson.
Nothing is simple in this messy situation, but Mr. Anderson's refusal to manage replacement players, even in spring training, is a refreshing display of integrity.
Disenchanted with the Detroit Tigers he may be, but he wouldn't refuse to manage for that reason, not with his first $1 million salary due this year. He took a "leave of absence" because he can't stomach the pathetic spectacle the nation's pastime threatens to make of itself.
Even the antics of players' union leader Donald Fehr may be helping. Not in the way he intends, though.
Many players quietly sympathize with people caught up in a strike who have no voice in the union and no job security. Managers, coaches and trainers are in that category. So are legitimate minor league players with real prospects of earning major league status. Mr. Fehr, who has a flair for weakening his own hand, decreed that minor leaguers who play exhibition games this spring will be deemed strike-breakers by the union. How's that for taking innocent hostages? Many major league players, who were minor leaguers themselves, will find that distasteful, as will those fans who have remained sympathetic to the players' position.
In this dispute, both sides have been fighting past battles. Once the exhibition season begins next week, they confront a different situation. Bombast and bravado won't suffice. Owners will lose millions more and players will ponder a future without pay checks. Orioles owner Peter Angelos, one of the few baseball people who understands the sport is teetering at the edge of a precipice, says a compromise can be reached. All that stands in the way are pig-headed leaders living in the past.