Word: griffey
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...Baseball Strike. Say it ain't so. A labor squabble accomplished what the Depression, two World Wars and an earthquake couldn't: it snuffed out the World Series. The strike killed a season of white-hot pennant races and on- the-diamond superlatives (Ken Griffey Jr. and Matt Williams were making credible runs at Ruth's home-run record; Tony Gwynn aimed to join Ted Williams in the .400 club). It also proved the only stat that baseball's millionaire players and multimillionaire owners really care about is the bottom line...
Twenty years ago, the players didn't grab their crotches on national television to show up their opponents (i.e., Ken Griffey, Jr.) or charge the mound every time a pitch came near them...
Bagwell, Gwynn, Griffey and Williams may yet have their years in the sun, but what really depresses is the realization that with every week and month of games lost, for all the fans still waiting patiently through this longest of rain delays, that many more foul balls don't get sprayed into the crowd, and kids like me, or real kids half my age, can't hold them aloft with the triumphant innocence of youth. And when baseball loses its youth, we won't have baseball...
...Griffey Jr of the Seattle Mariners is a perfect example of what is currently right in baseball. Playing in a small market with a team that knows little about winning, his highlight films rarely made the 11:00 news on the East Coast. Yet fans nationwide were acutely aware of his quest to break Roger Maris' home run record; he arrived in Pittsburgh this year for the All-Star game with 1.8 million votes more than any other player in history. He recently played himself, in the movie Angels in the Outfield. People are actually seen outside of King County...
...more important than their own bottom line," he says. "The history of baseball is the history of phenomenal human beings and events, like Roger Maris hitting 61 home runs. To think that across the board, for both owners and players, something could be more important than Ken Griffey or Frank Thomas or Matt Williams hitting that many home runs -- I find it just abhorrent...