The Last Great Season

THE STORM CLOUDS HAD PASSED OVER, leaving behind a cool, clear Florida evening, a perfect night for the grandest spectacle that baseball could offer: Nolan Ryan pitching in a spring-training ball park so intimate that there are no bad seats. Ryan, "the Wizard of Whiff," 46 years young (Bill Clinton's junior by five months), was dazzling against the New York Yankees on this mid- March evening. For the 5,000 lucky fans, all that mattered was the explosive pop of Ryan's fastball into the glove of Texas Ranger catcher Ivan Rodriguez. During his five-inning stint, Ryan (he of the record seven no- hitters) flirted with perfection: four strikeouts, no walks and only a dinky two-strike single to mar the ledger.

Afterward, in the Ranger locker room, his medical-marvel right arm wrapped in an ice pack, Ryan grew pensive. What bothered him, as he looked ahead to his record 27th and, alas, final big-league season, was not the intimations of his own baseball mortality but rather the odd sensation of pitching to five- time batting champion Wade Boggs in a Yankee uniform. For 11 seasons, Boggs was as much a part of the Boston Red Sox as the fabled Green Monster wall in Fenway Park's left field. Now he had changed to pinstripes (part of the off- season free-agent frenzy in which 91 veteran players shifted teams), and it troubled an old-school ballplayer like Ryan. "It's just a sign of the times," he said. "We grew up expecting a major-league team to protect its nucleus and be pretty much the same from year to year. It's not that way anymore."

Ryan's lament can serve as the one-sentence epitaph for major-league baseball: it's not the way it was growing up. Slowly but surely, this most memory-laden of sports, this pastoral isle in a world of flux, is being ripped from its traditional foundations. Watching his World Champion Blue Jays take batting practice, Toronto manager Cito Gaston mused about the eight free agents his team did not re-sign in the off-season, including future Hall of Famer Dave Winfield. "What disappoints me is all the guys who won't be there on opening day to get their World Series rings," Gaston said. "It's just the business side of baseball."

This week, as the cry "Play ball!" heralds America's ode to spring, how tempting it is to avert our eyes from the business side of baseball. How we want to believe the game on the field is what counts, not the internal problems of a $1.6 billion entertainment industry.

Cherish the moment, bleacher bums, for this April's budding of baseball may be our final frolic in the sun. Next year there might not be baseball at all, if the owners stick to their resolve not to open the spring-training camps unless the players agree to hold the line on salaries. Already the game has lost its supreme arbiter; for the first time since 1921, a season will open with no commissioner of baseball or heir apparent. In the counting houses off the field, schemes are being hatched to transform the leisurely unfolding of the 162-game season into a juiced-up MTV video, complete with expanded play- offs, wild-card teams, Monday-night interleague contests and heedless expansion certain to dilute the quality of the game. Traditionalists may look back on 1993 with nostalgia as the last old-fashioned baseball season.