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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, "Taking Care of Labor Pains," Morgan lays out fairly clearly the power-struggle between the baseball owners, who want some revenue-sharing plan that will likely involve player salary caps, and the players, who refuse to have their market value limited in any way. So far, so good. The basic problem that led to the 1994 strike, and that is more or less unresolved, seems pretty clear. But then Morgan's devotion to the players' union, of which he was a charter member, kicks in, and he makes some rather dubious analogies:

Before the players won free agency in a landmark arbitration case, something called the reserve clause tied us to an organization for life. Once a team signed a player, it literally owned him. Just imagine that. You had no say in where you could work until the day you retired. There were millions of other people laboring under the same onerous terms, but most of them were living on the wrong side of a wall in Germany, or in a Chinese commune.

When he turns from off-the-field disputes to his suggestions for improving the game or restoring it to it former glory, Morgan sees himself as the prototype for how the game should be played. For example, he wants the see the stolen base resurface as a key element of offensive baseball. Now it just happens that Morgan himself was a prolific base stealer, especially during his glory years with the Cincinnati Reds.

Further on, in the chapter entitled "Don't Kill the Umpires! (Just Teach Them the Strike Zone)," Morgan offers a diatribe against— guess who—the notorious "pitcher's umpires." Of course, we remember that Morgan spent his 22 years in the league as a tremendous hitter, and a look at league ERAs and home run totals from 1998 through 2001 hardly suggests that hitters are being squeezed.

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March (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46