To fans who had already suffered and smoldered their way through five weeks without baseball, yesterday's formal cancellation of the season was a distinct nonevent, merely confirming what had become all too obvious.
As many of them made clear, well before yesterday's announcement, embittered fans had already canceled baseball, some, they vowed, forever. "This is an obituary that doesn't deserve to be on the first page," said Neal Kendall, a longtime Yankee fan who works in Chicago as a producer of the syndicated "Jenny Jones" talk show. "Especially since the start of the National Football League season," he added. "The first day of the N.F.L. was the last day of concern for the strike."
Like other Yankee fans, Kendall expressed particular distress that the strike had come in the midst of the team's best season in years. "It was the most excited I've been about baseball since the late 70's and early 80's," he said. "It's sad, but as far as I'm concerned it's onto other things." David Huck, a Phillies fan from South Jersey who was doing some maintenance work in New York yesterday, echoed the point. "They've been on strike so long," he said, "I'm kind of glad they're going to cancel, since both sides will be hurt, not just the fans. They'll not only lose money, but interest in the future."
Will his interest be lessened next year? "I'm going to try to stay away from it," he said. So, too, is John Schwartz, a sales executive with the Meadowbrook Farms dairy in the Bronx. "I can say that the last baseball game I ever attended was Phil Rizzuto Night at Yankee Stadium a couple of days before the strike," he said. "I'm not going to be a part of the baseball picture anymore."
In Aspen, Colo., where he teaches skiing and operates a lawn-care business, Chris Tyler, a Philadelphia-born, Delaware-bred Phillies fan, echoed a broad sentiment. "I've heard a lot about what's in the best interest of the owners or the players," Tyler said. "Nobody's talking about what's in the best interests of the game or the fans." Tyler suggested that his interest in baseball would be reduced next season, at least for a while. "I'm sure I'll pay attention," he said, "but it'll take at least a season to get back to where I was."
A Yankee fan who attends 10 to 20 games a year, Paul Likitsakos, who works at the Nature's Gifts produce company on East 86th Street in Manhattan, sounded determined to keep his boycott vow. "I promised myself that if they canceled the season I'll never go to another game," he said. Even if his Yankees get in a hot race next season? 'They were in a hot race this year," he said. "They were in the playoffs. They ruined that. So why should we watch them again?"
Matt Umanov, a 47-year-old Mets fan who has sold guitars on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village for close to 30 years, offered an answer. Baseball, he suggested, was very special. "Even Walt Whitman said it," he said. "If you know baseball you know how Americans think. There are so many imponderables. You go to a game. You sit there. There is no time limit. Anything can happen."
Asked if he was a fan, Thomas Barreca, 77, who operates Baseball Batting at Gateway, a batting cage business on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, didn't hesitate. "No, not anymore," said Barreca, who explained that he wasn't so much concerned about the strike as a grudge he has been nursing for four decades. "I was a fan, kind of," he said, "until the Dodgers left Brooklyn. When the Dodgers left, I left."
He may not be a fan anymore, but, as he pointed out, Barreca does have an opinion. "The players picked a bad time to strike," he said. "They could have waited until after the season." John Dejana, a 60-year-old draftsman who helps design sprinkler systems at Higgins Fire Protection in Hempstead, L.I., said the baseball season had already been dead for him. "I don't really care anymore," he said. "I get up and go to work in the morning. They deserve each other. The rest of the world still goes around."
If baseball resumes next season, some bitter fans may eventually relent. If it doesn't, some new Americans may be deprived of a national obsession. At the one New York business where there were no fans, the man who answered the phone at Nathan Borlam Children's and Ladies Wear in Brooklyn with a thick accent put it this way: "We don't understand baseball yet."
