No Baseball Socialism

A couple of days ago while I prepared myself for a day of learning, an event for which I daily thank God, I chanced to glance upon the lower right corner of The Crimson's sport's page. While I usually find The Crimson to be an outstanding example of student journalism, one which could not happen in a less free society, I was both shocked and repulsed.

There, glowering from its last page banishment, sat, like a spoiled child, an article that portended to prescribe a remedy for the "ills" now afflicting the game of major league baseball ("Owners: It's Time for Them To Go" December 3). In this article, the same forces which ruined the lives of two generations were lionized as the sole means of saving a game, a way of life, which in its execution is the closest human endeavor can come to perfection. This I could not stand to see besmirched.

Perhaps I should explain the reason for the violence of my reaction. For 26 years I lived under a socialist system which claimed to be working towards that egalitarian society wherein each would give according to his or her abilities and take according to his or her needs. I refer of course to what is now called the failed ideology of communism, but was not long ago referred to as the red menace.

For years, all things Western were deemed subversive. I stumbled upon baseball whole doing my military service in Cuba. When I first saw the game, I was stunned by its combination of beauty and intellect, traits which I have since found only in one place, my wife.

In baseball, I saw a divine parallel for life itself: Men striving against their own limits to attain, through concentration and effort, the perfection that eludes, and by touching this plane, to gain a small measure of immortality.

For years, I covertly listened to broadcasts from the United States on a small short-wave radio over the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. They sustained my faith in God, and through him my hopes for a future.

The author of that sports columns should confine his utopian visions to the daydreams of his classroom and the bowels of his papers. There sentiments, when projected on such a forum as The Crimson, unflatteringly highlight the immaturities of the paper's editorial staff.

Yes, Marge Schott is an evil woman, but her existence, like that of the self-centered and wasteful Czars, should not, cannot and God willing, will not be used to justify the implementation upon baseball of a system which would slowly strangle it and rob it of its noble traits. Uri Eugienivich