CLEARWATER, Fla. -- I used to get upset hearing people categorize major-league baseball players as overpaid, under-motivated so-and-so's who don't appreciate how well off they really are.
Those people don't know these men on a personal level. How can they suggest that they're all alike simply because of what they do for a living?
Sure, some of today's players are spoiled rotten, interested only in squeezing whatever they can out of the game without putting anything back in. But there are good, hard-working men who play the game, too.
It's like anything else. There are good teachers and bad teachers, good writers and bad writers, good plumbers and bad plumbers, good guys playing big-league baseball and some out-and-out jerks playing it.
For years, I've heard players complain about unfair generalizations. But now some of them are falling into the same trap, spurred by the pressures and animosities generated by the baseball strike.
Last Tuesday, the Phillies' Norm Charlton, a left-handed pitcher with a history of arm problems -- he had an $850,000 contract last year and didn't throw a pitch -- met with reporters and took off on replacement players. He said he wanted nothing to do with them, which was fine -- a man has a right to his feelings -- but then he ripped into them as a group. And that wasn't so fine.
"They have no idea what it's all about," he said. "If they did, they wouldn't do it."
Yeah, he was reminded, but how about those replacement players with big-league backgrounds? Surely, they had an idea and knew what they were doing.
"That," Charlton said, referring to a former major-leaguer in camp, a man he had never met, "ought to tell you something about his character -- or lack of it."
It was an unfortunate remark, one of many made in the course of the baseball strike. Charlton was saying that all replacement players, no matter their situations, no matter their reasons for doing what they're doing, were beneath contempt.
We live in a free country. A man has a right to go on strike, even if he's making $5 million a year. Or to go to spring training as a replacement player for $5,000 up front and $15 a day meal money.
Who is Norm Charlton -- or any of us -- to say that the three dozen or so replacement players in the Phillies' camp this week have no right to be there and lack character?
We're going to hear a lot more of the thoughtless nonsense that Charlton spouted Tuesday. This messy affair will get a lot worse before it's resolved. Labor strikes and name-calling go hand in hand.
The other day, a minor-leaguer -- not a replacement player -- talked about a phone call to the Major League Players Association seeking information. The person in the union office referred to replacement players as "the scum of the earth."
"Hey," the minor-league player said, "here's a guy making six figures, sitting behind a desk. How does he know?"
He doesn't, any more than Norm Charlton does.
"I don't blame any of them," Lee Thomas, the Phillies' general manager, said of the replacement players, speaking at the Phils' minor-league complex a few minutes before Charlton did his number at Jack Russell Stadium.
"None of them has it made in life. They're not doing it to hurt the major-league players. They either need the money or they have a dream."
Thomas isn't happy about the current baseball situation. Nobody is. But if you're a baseball man, you can appreciate the factors that drove the replacement players to leave their jobs back home for this one last fling.
"I had a meeting with them," Thomas said. "I told them I appreciate their coming in. 'It took some guts to come in,' I told them, 'and I'm behind you 100 percent. If I can help you in any way, don't hesitate to come to me.' That's what I told them.
"Yeah, I don't like it any more than anybody else, but I'm going to do the best I can for them. They're human beings. And hey, they didn't just come in here without having a little intestinal fortitude."
"What about all these people who knock them?" I asked Thomas.
"It's cheap," he said. "Put yourself in their bodies. See what you'd do. You don't know. Every one of these guys, there's a reason why they're here, and their reason isn't to hurt the major-league guys."
Think about it and you might decide that the men with the most character aren't the millionaire strikers, but those much-maligned replacement players who, knowing how nasty it was likely to get, came to camp anyway, to make a few dollars and pursue a dream.