Word: oaklanders
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...such August fantasies were not to be, not in Cleveland, Ohio, nor anywhere else in the green cathedrals of what Annie Savoy in Bull Durham called "the Church of Baseball." The 1994 major league season may have ended for good late Thursday night in Oakland, California, with the sadly appropriate third strike as A's pinch hitter Ernie Young whiffed on a fast ball from strikeout king Randy Johnson of the Seattle Mariners. With that final, futile swing, the national pastime went down for the count as the more than 750 members of the Major League Players Association began their...
...there is an unquantifiable loss. The pastoral joys of baseball, joys that no other sport can match, have dissipated. That final prestrike game at Oakland Coliseum last Thursday night can serve as a parable. A balmy summer night, small children with oversize mitts dreaming of foul balls, peanuts, Cracker Jack and the familiar Take Me Out to the Ball Game played during the seventh-inning stretch. But then it came time for the refrain "It's one! two! three strikes, you're out!" A chorus of boos rose from the stands...
Baseball teaches its disciples patience and resilience -- how else to survive a six-month season in which even great teams lose 60 games? But there were danger signs amid the 26,808 fans in Oakland that this time around both the players and the owners might be caught stealing the hearts of the faithful. Placards told part of the story: OWNERS AND PLAYERS: WHEN IS ENOUGH ENOUGH? And WILL PLAY FOR FOOD. But so did the number of black-and-silver N.F.L. Raider caps in the crowd. "Do the players play because of a love of the game or because...
...that mythic street urchin wailed, "Say it ain't so, Joe" to Shoeless Joe Jackson after he confessed that he was involved in fixing the 1919 World Series, generations of sad-eyed children have been forced to learn that baseball can be a cruel business. So it was in Oakland with 14-year-old Jeremy Musser and his brother Nick, 11. The moral for Nick is that "the players are getting too greedy." Jeremy's allegiance to the game is in danger of fading. "If I can't be a baseball fan," he said practically, "I'll probably switch...
...season! On the day the strike date was announced, 12 teams were thinking pennant, in first place or fewer than three games out. That's partly because the majors expanded this year from four divisions to six, but it also means there was July joy in Cleveland and Oakland and Houston and Colorado...