March (Web-only) 2002

ARTICLE TOOLS

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Another season's about to begin, and for the moment, anything seems possible—even the Cubs in the Series. And in that hopeful moment, too, it seems that baseball might avert the disaster long in the making, might swerve just in the nick of time from the self-destructive course that players and owners alike have seemed hell-bent on pursuing to the bitter end.

Last week we listened in on Tim McCarver's engaging but overly optimistic reports on the state of the game. Joe Morgan, whose tenure as a player was as long as McCarver's and whose broadcast work has also been extensive, seems more willing to broaden his concerns and to temper them with skepticism. In his 1999 volume Long Balls, No Strikes: What Baseball Must Do to Keep the Good Times Rolling, Morgan (along with co-writer Richard Lally) begins with a reflection on the revitalization which the 1998 season breathed into the game—"This was the year baseball came out of his coma"—but, unlike McCarver, he is rightly cautious about the long-term effects of this boon. For Morgan, the reclamation project has only begun.

When he turns to the specifics of what needs to be done, Morgan begins to reveal a bias which is at first endearing, then a bit maddening, and which at last seems rather self-serving. You see, Joe Morgan is a Hall of Fame player, an MVP, a world champion, one of the best offensive second basemen ever. And that is the problem with this book. Who he is skews everything he has to say. Just as McCarver, the average player but ultra-observant catcher, sees the game as an analyst of skills and situations and nuts and bolts, so Morgan, the superstar with deep loyalties and sharp opinions, wants to see the game as Joe Morgan would have it be.

In an early and important chapter, ...