By Randy Horick

Were you to visit my old hometown and ask folks on the street to furnish an example of unmitigated gall, the name of my old friend Audrey would likely come up.

Audrey was a local legend on three counts (well, four, if you include that he drove a lime-green AMC Gremlin). For one thing, when he turned 18, he became the first registered voter in the history of our junior high school. Second, he developed—though, unfortunately, failed to perfect—a method for catching a 12-pound shotput on its descent. He stopped practicing this skill after misjudging a throw and catching the shot with his groin instead of his hands.

Third, Audrey single-handedly inflated both the employment and unemployment figures in our town. His academic deficiencies notwithstanding, he possessed an uncanny ability to land jobs—usually by launching into some spectacular whopper when asked to describe the skills that qualified him for the task. Generally, it took a week or two for employers to figure out that Audrey could no more prepare an omelet or lay tile than he could pilot a spacecraft. Then he’d go out and repeat the same process with some other business owner who hadn’t yet heard of Audrey’s spreading renown.

His shortest job tenure, at a lumber yard, clocked in at under 90 minutes. Audrey had landed the position based on his claim—without a scintilla of truth behind it—that he could expertly operate a forklift. His first assignment, to move a pallet of bricks, predictably ended in a pile of rubble.

“Anyone can make a mistake,” reasoned the employer, who instructed Audrey to clean up the mess and move a second load. When he dropped and broke every one of those bricks, too, Audrey was informed by the owner that his services were no longer required.

But the part that people still talk about when the subject of pure brass comes up is that, after some reflection, Audrey returned to the lumberyard later that morning and politely asked to be paid for the hour-and-a-half that he had worked. Only his shot-catching strength saved him from a serious beating.

I was thinking about Audrey this week, probably because this is the week that baseball season opened. The two are linked in my mind. When it comes to pure intelligence-insulting chutzpah, complemented by shot-put-catching ignorance, Major League Baseball is about the only thing I know that could beat Audrey five out of five times.

Now you may be rightly thinking, “Hold on there, pilgrim. Wasn’t it just a couple of years ago that baseball recaptured our collective imagination? Didn’t Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa both surpass Roger Maris’ home-run record and make fans feel like wide-eyed kids? Didn’t the national pastime seem like, well, the national pastime again?”

True enough. And yet, except for strike-infected seasons (and we’ll get to that directly), it’ll make your brain itch trying to remember an opening of a baseball campaign that was harder to get excited about than this one. And it’s nobody’s fault but baseball’s owners, players, and agents, who provide some of the best evidence, next to the British royal family, that money does not confer sense.

In baseball’s case, it may be more accurate to say that money has destroyed all sense. (The Plains Indians, whose term for gold translated as “the metal that makes white men crazy,” would have understood the phenomenon.)

Player salaries have been so irrationally exuberant for so long now that they’d make Alan Greenspan break out in hives. Now, however, fans who were once disgusted are simply numb as they try to figure out how one player, Alex Rodriguez, could be worth more than the entire purchase price of the Texas Rangers, the team for which he plays. (A-Rod, by our ciphering, is worth approximately 120 times his weight in gold.)

Deals like A-Rod’s—which, if baseball’s economics don’t change, will seem like a Blue-Light Special in a few years—have shifted attention away from a rising green tide. These days $10 million-per-annum contracts are more abundant than pill bugs, and a pitcher who can win just 10 games may earn a million bucks each season.

The salaries are one big strike against the game, whose players are resented by fans not just because they’re so lavishly paid, but because they’re also perceived as never satisfied with their spoils.

Many of the owners, of course, don’t sweat paying stratospheric sums, since they can simply raise ticket prices to offset their costs. That’s what the Rangers are doing to pay for “A-Lot,” as some fans have dubbed him. Last time I attended a game at Comiskey Park in Chicago, it cost me $21 to sit in the miserable outfield. Can you guess the relationship between rising prices and fan interest? Strike two.

Some of these same owners also can afford to buy players (and pennants) because baseball does not share revenues—strike three. From selling their local broadcasting rights, the New York Yankees earn well over $100 million. The small-market Montreal Expos earn about $3 million. So the Yanks can afford pricey free agents, like Mike Mussina and Roger Clemens, who make it possible to win championships. The Expos, one of the best organizations at developing young talent, eventually have to part with their rising stars because they can’t afford to re-sign them.

Increasingly, baseball is divided not into the haves and have-nots, but the haves and have-no-chances. Now, for the first time, the owners talk openly of shutting down several small-market franchises—such as Montreal, Minnesota, and Kansas City—that lack the financial wherewithal to compete.

Meanwhile, nothing dampens interest (Yankees) in a new season like already knowing (Yankees) who’s going to win. There is always a chance, of course, that New York will lose. Britney Spears might also become a nun. If you’re a believer in either possibility, this will be a riveting pennant race for you.

You’d think that baseball’s brain trust (to use a term you won’t hear every day) would have doped out somewhere along here that they have a big, hairy problem—that on top of alienating fans they’re insulting them. Then again, baseball is led by owner/commissioner Bud “What, Me Worry?” Selig, who represents one of the most kadiddled choices for an important post since Caligula appointed his horse to the Roman Senate.

Bud and the boys, instead of hearing alarm bells, are treating the possible loss of baseball teams as a positive thing—a move that will make the game healthier by reversing the trend toward spreading talent too thinly around the league. Had he been a passenger on the Titanic, Bud doubtless would have looked on the bright side by noting that he needed to work on his swimming strokes anyway.

Fortunately, as my friend Audrey discovered, there’s nothing like a shotput to the groin to clue you that it may be time to change strategies. For baseball, the shot may come in the form of strike four—a strike in the literal sense that may take place when the labor agreement between management and players expires after this season.

With any luck, a “work stoppage” (the term preferred by baseball executives who think “strike” or “lockout” sound a mite too fan-unfriendly) will lead both sides to realize that the owners need to share revenues equally and the players need to accept a salary cap. Maybe, while we’re at it, Britney will enter a convent and stay there. But I’m not holding my breath.

With any luck, a “work stoppage” (the term preferred by baseball executives who think “strike” or “lockout” sound a mite too fan-unfriendly) will lead both sides to realize that the owners need to share revenues equally and the players need to accept a salary cap. Maybe, while we’re at it, Britney will enter a convent and stay there. But I’m not holding my breath.