So baseball is just a game and the strike doesn't mean much, eh?
Well, get a load of this:
In 1981, a 50-day major league strike started in June. A month later, the U.S. economy sank into a wretched recession that sent the unemployment rate soaring to 10.8% in just a year and a half.
There you have it. A baseball strike can bring the world's largest economy to its knees.
OK, maybe that goes too far. Other things helped push the economy over the edge. Double-digit inflation. A 21.5% prime rate. Nosediving exports. Charles marrying Diana.
While the economy looks fine now, don't dismiss this latest stand-off between millionaire owners and millionaire players. There are some economic issues to consider. And they're about as serious as this age-old question: Why is the foul pole in fair territory? For instance:
-- A blow to spending - or not? Since the strike began, more than 9 million tickets haven't been sold. Owners have lost $238 million in revenue. Players haven't been paid more than $127 million. And thousands of beer vendors, hot dog hawkers, bar owners and souvenir sellers have missed out on millions in sales.
TV networks and local stations have lost millions in ad revenue. ABC and NBC had $130 million in commitments for ads this season.
Fans from out of town are no longer staying at hotels and eating in restaurants in major league cities.
Scary sounding news, but look on the bright side. "Now when my wife and I go to our favorite breakfast place on the weekends there's no danger we'll be surrounded by all those damn people wearing red hats because the St. Louis Cardinals are in town," says James Annable, a Chicago Cubs fan and chief economist at First National Bank of Chicago.
Seriously, to anyone who depends on major league baseball for income, the strike is bad news. "There's a real economic impact for the owners, the players and the people who work for the clubs or around the ballparks," says David Berson, chief economist at the Federal National Mortgage Association and a baseball rotisserie league fanatic.
Fortunately, in a nation of 255 million people with a $6.5 trillion economy, the number of people being affected is relatively small.
And at least some money that fans would have spent on tickets, beers and caps will be spent elsewhere.
"I had some tickets for some upcoming Orioles games," Berson says. "I suspect that I, like other fans, will turn them in for refunds and waste some of the money on some other form of frivolous entertainment."
Many fans will just spend the money elsewhere in the baseball world: Minor league attendance has soared.
-- A boon to productivity - maybe. There are no pennant races to discuss around fax machines, on the assembly line or over store counters.
There's no reason to waste an hour of work time debating the relative merits of Ken Griffey Jr. of the Seattle Mariners and the San Francisco Giants' Barry Bonds.
The fun of betting with co-workers on whether San Diego Padre Tony Gwynn can bat .400 is gone.
Rotisserie league fanatics have no boxscores to plug into computer programs they're hiding from the boss.
And in Chicago, where the Cubs still play a majority of weekday games in the afternoons, there's no excuse to cut out of work early.
So, productivity should soar, right? Cars will be built better, fast-food orders will be filled right, clerks will be standing by. Efficiency will climb.
"Maybe not," says Annable, the Cubs fan. For one thing, long rehashings at work of the previous night's game may have been replaced by debates about who's more evil, owners or players. The topic is new, but work is still not being done.
For depressed fans, the strike may affect their work performance.
Plus, football season just started. "I know I now don't give a damn about baseball," says Laurence Meyer, president of a St. Louis economic consulting firm. "The (NFL's New York) Giants are playing this Sunday. That's what I care about now."
So Meyer and a lot of other sports fans may just switch their office chit-chat from baseball to whether or not the Buffalo Bills should be banned from the Super Bowl no matter what. No productivity boost from that.
And think about this: If the Labor Deparment could figure out how to include the major league players in its figures, productivity might take a sharp drop because of the strike.
"Any time you take (White Sox) Frank Thomas away from what he does for a living, you have to have lowered productivity," Annable says.
But, he concedes, "productivity and the Cubs don't exactly go together. So maybe it's all a wash."
-- Bats and balls - leading indicators? In economics, anything that's supposed to last three years or longer - like a car - is a durable good. Everything else is non-durable.
Durable goods are supposedly quite important. After all, not many people order something that they're going to be using for three years or more unless they're pretty confident they'll still have a job, or a company to run, for the foreseeable future.
But don't look for much of a strike-related effect on orders for durable goods. It doesn't look like baseball generates much demand.
Bats? Light-hitting pitchers are about the only players who might get Louisville Sluggers to last three years. American League pitchers, of course, don't even come to the plate. Bats are non-durables for sure.
Balls? Not the way they've been jumping out of the park this year. A ball is lucky to last three batters, much less three years. Non-durables.
Uniforms? Hah. The way ballplayers scratch, spit and dive in the dirt, three years is asking way too much. Gloves? Maybe they're durables. "I still have the glove I used in Pony league," says Annable.
-- An affront to what economists hold dear - sort of. Beyond all the economic mumbo jumbo, you come to the real issue about the strike that bothers economists.
Here's the problem: Baseball owners want a salary cap. Economists, at least when they think like economists, scoff at that idea.
"A salary cap just isn't practical," says Lawrence Klein, batboy for the Omaha Robin Hoods in the early 1930s and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1980.
"We don't do that in American industry. We use the marketplace to determine wages and it works just fine." The best workers get the best wages. That's how owners inspire employees.
But then, economists start to think like fans. And they go at least part way toward changing their minds.
At least that's happened to Klein. "I have another feeling, an almost sociological one," he says. "It seems to me that if you get paid for doing something you really like to do anyway - and it's the national pastime, you should be reasonable about your wages." The players, says Klein the fan, "should give a little."
Imagine that. A Nobel Prize-winning economist amending one of his basic views.
So baseball is just a game and the strike doesn't mean much, eh?
