Cheaper Tickets Now!

A week ago, I went to my first baseball game in the last nine months.

The weather was cool.

The soda (yes, soda) was cold.

And the fan response was like the Siberian tundra.

Barely 22,000 fans showed up to see the red-hot Red Sox wrest first place from the Yankees.

The game had everything a fan could want. There were rallies when teams were down, there were clutch base hits, crucial strikeouts and jockeying on the basepaths and in the bullpen.

The game ended on a home run in the bottom of the ninth.

Perfect game, no?

Well, not exactly. Fenway Park, venerable home of Boston baseball for almost a century, was dead as a door nail.

The bleachers were a sea of empty green seats, as if to mock the giant "Thanks Fans" sign on the Diamond Vision.

The Wave hardly made it out of the bleachers.

No one got arrested or thrown out of the stadium.

What a bore!

I have to admit, I was surprised. As much as I thought the fans were angry, as much as I thought players and owners had take them for granted during their nine-month fratricide, I always felt that once the National Anthem started playing again, the fans would flock back to their seats. Clearly, I was wrong.

Fan resentment of the rich players and the richer owners is nothing new. But this time, it seems like fans are beginning to see the game not as an escape from the world's aggravations, but a source of them.

In a way, the fans are right. For all their vicious battles in the courts and in the press, the players and owners are no closer now to a collective bargaining agreement than they were B.S. (Before Strike).

And I'm not sure fans are making their predicted exodus to the NBA, or the NHL or (gasp) the NFL. I think they're giving up.

Every sport is so badly removed from its fans. Players have little use for fans, taking them for granted, thinking they'll always shell out the big bucks to see them play.

Baseball will not heal overnight; the pathetic attendance Tuesday night established that.

There are so many sources of entertainment now; the technological revolution that brought baseball into the homes of America and billions of advertising dollars into baseball's coffers has produced other forms of cheap entertainment, from British royalty to O.J. Simpson.

What baseball should do now is go on. Bury the hatchet. And hope that players' great season will recaptivate fan interest.

Baseball could come back, though in a number of ways.

Stop talking about the strike. Start talking about the Streak (Cal Ripken's Streak, that is). Market the players; stop fighting them.

And baseball has the most games of any professional season. Owners: cut prices. TOMORROW. PERMANENTLY.

Example: don't charge fans five dollars for parking on top of the 30 you make them pay for the game. After all, how many movie theaters charge for the use of their parking lots?

Cutting prices really would lure the people who want to see baseball but don't like funding multi-millionaire crybabies.

These are the people that embraced the minor-leagues as a cheaper, folksier, more affordable alternative to the majors.

After losing up to a billion dollars on the Disaster of 1994, surely they could be willing to prove their loyalty to their fans by doing that.

The owners tried to cut costs by drastic measures; the players resisted equally drastically.

Surely they could muster some of that fervor to save the game that is their livelihood.