FAST for Baseball

"I don't have to tell you things are bad," intoned Howard Beale, the anchorman-cum-savant of Network. Neither do I.

It rains every day. The basketball season will end in August. One of the candidates for President might win. And, of course, there may be a baseball strike.

Finally, something may be done about it.

Mike Levin and Dave Katzner, seniors at Amherst and Ithaca, respectively, have organized FAST, Fans Against Strike Talk, a conglomeration dedicated to averting the major league baseball strike currently scheduled to begin May 23.

"We want baseball to take our voice as seriously as they take our money," says Katzner, who has devised a complicated, yet rather simple-minded idea about how baseball depends on the owners, the players and the fans, arguing that it cannot exist without any of the three. No kidding.

FAST will present the negotiators in the dispute "tangible evidence that we think we are being ignored," says Levin. Eleven regional coordinators are collecting signatures at opening days around the nation. Operating in concert with the Detroit-based Baseball Bugs of America, FAST expects to have 60,000 signatures within about a week or so.

The Dismal Science

Katzner, after having spent the afternoon spreading the FAST gospel at Shea Stadium, gave an earnest exhortation on why he wants "economics kept outside of the chalk lines." He also confided that a chance for national exposure barely slipped from his grasp this morning when he was bumped from Good Morning America in favor of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

Of course any mildly loony idea must arrive in Boston sooner or later, and FAST is due Monday. Levin is organizing a rally for Monday at noon by the bleacher (where else?) entrance to Fenway.

There, he will urge that "umpires, and not mediators, call the balls and strikes." (FAST has dozens of these cute phrases.)

Maybe these guys have a point. Katzner says he got 2000 signatures at Shea yesterday, and that's probably more than the number of people who were there.