Sport: The Boys of Spring

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Baseball's bridesmaids open the season with pennant dreams

The call to "Play ball!," the surest and happiest sign of spring, has sounded once again. The crack of the bat has replaced the clack of the auctioneer's gavel selling off free-agent flesh. Players safe in their tax shelters now worry only about being safe at first, and owners prick their ears for the sweetest music they know, the clatter of turnstiles. The baseball season has begun.

President Reagan had planned to throw out the first ball in Cincinnati last week, the first Chief Executive to do so since President Ford in 1976, but since he was still in the hospital, the opening day ritual was skipped altogether. Explained the Reds' p.a. announcer: "There can really be no appropriate relief pitcher for the President of the United States."

How long the season will last is problematical. With a Memorial Day weekend strike deadline drawing near, the owners and players are still locked in a nasty dispute over free-agent compensation. The issue, deferred in an eleventh-hour compromise that prevented a strike last season, seems no closer to settlement than it was a year ago. Under the old agreement, a veteran can play out his option and sell his services on the open market; in compensation for loss of his services, his former team was awarded an amateur draft choice from his new club. The owners want to be able to pick a man from the raiding team's major league roster. In the players' view, such an arrangement would stifle the free-agent market that has made millionaires of home-run hitters and fastball pitchers.

Such concerns were far from the minds of fans last week, for spring and baseball mean but one thing: hope. Hopes were highest, the dreams most poignant in the cities that finished second in 1980. There, stirring pennant races had ended in disappointment and the inevitable promise to wait 'til next year. A look at the bridesmaid teams and their prospects:

Montreal Expos, National League East. In 1979, Montreal finished two games behind the Pittsburgh Pirates, eventual World Series winners over the Baltimore Orioles; last year they lost the title to the World Champion Phillies on the next-to-last day of the season. Over that two-year span, the Expos won more games than any other team in the National League. Now, on the third try, Montreal is ready to challenge again, this time with that most coveted baseball contradiction: a team of young veterans. Only Ace Pitcher Steve Rogers remains from the 1973 roster, and most of the team (average age 27) has undergone its trial by fire in the big leagues, not down on the farm. Says First Baseman Warren Cromartie, the blithe spirit who plays team cheerleader: "Logic tells us that this is supposed to be our year. We've been maturing, just like a wine."