Apologies Still in Order for a Forgiving Crowd

As the Angels and Baltimore Orioles played at Edison Field last night, a group of shirtless fans stood up in the right-field bleachers, then turned their backs on the game and delivered a message via body paint: “KCAL PUT US ON TV.”

See? All it took was all-night bargaining sessions and unprecedented concessions by the Major League Baseball Players Assn. to return Angel fans to their normal state.

One night after they staged a mini-uprising, pelting the field and players with everything from bottles to slices of pizza and tossing foul balls back toward the mound, the crowd was back to its polite, tepid ways.

They cheered warmly for the Angels. They applauded Angel starter Mickey Callaway for his efforts after Geronimo Gil broke up his no-hitter with one out in the sixth inning. They roared for Adam Kennedy’s diving stop of a grounder in the ninth. They kept every ball hit into the stands.

No baseball, no peace was the message they seemed to send with their rambunctious actions Thursday night. And their wishes were granted. A collective bargaining agreement was reached early Friday morning without an interruption in play, and by Friday evening 29,959 forgiving fans returned to Edison Field.

“Just happy to be here,” one woman said on the way in.

The fans clapped along with the beat to “Car Wash.” One held up a sign that said “Play Ball,” with a picture of Gene Autry.

“Fortunately, tonight they came out and supported us,” Angel shortstop David Eckstein said. “We couldn’t ask for a better crowd.

“The fans are important. Without them, we wouldn’t have a game. They make the game. [Thursday night], they were just showing their disapproval of what was going on.”

The fans had their moment. They were heard. The owners and players acknowledged them, even if they didn’t embrace them.

I still think the negotiators acted in their own interests, more concerned with potential economic repercussions and tattered reputations than the best interests of the fans. But at least they realized that the fans weren’t ready to tolerate another work stoppage.

The talking heads can go away now. Time for a roll call of people who received way too much exposure with all of the strike talk. We’ll call it the Zimba-list, named in honor of economics professor Andrew Zimbalist, who was quoted about 100 times in the last two weeks: Bud Selig, Don Fehr, Rob Manfred, Bob DuPuy, Gene

Orza, John Moag and Dean Bonham.

Oh, and Paul Lo Duca and Scott Schoeneweis? You are now dismissed. I’ll never blast players who go out of their way to accommodate the media’s demand for information, but Lo Duca and Schoeneweis turned out to be too talkative for their own good. They’re baseball players, not spokesmen, and the fact that they were forced to assume those extra duties was just another negative byproduct of the near-strike.

Lo Duca, Dodger catcher and player representative, angered Dodger management with his hard-line stance earlier in the week, then got in hot water with his union comrades when he blabbed inaccurate information about the proposed drug-testing plan. Schoeneweis, the Angel pitcher and player representative, prompted a flurry furious calls and e-mails to the Angels after he questioned the fans’ class and likened their behavior to 4-year-olds for the actions Thursday night.

Schoeneweis backtracked and apologized for those comments Friday.

The fans booed him when he entered the game in relief in the eighth inning. They booed even louder when he threw a wild pitch.

It showed the fans aren’t simply going to pretend no ill will has accumulated.

There need to be more apologies and even more gestures of appreciation to everyone who has stuck with a game that produced nothing but bad news since the last car came to a halt in the Arizona Diamondbacks’ victory parade last November.

From contraction to steroids to labor strife, I can’t think of a worse 10-month stretch of news for a sport that didn’t actually go through a work stoppage. You think, maybe, the sport might actually start promoting its players instead of going out of its way to disparage them? You think the players can make sure they show gratitude toward the fans who allow them to enjoy their plush lifestyles?

The last time baseball gave us a story we could embrace was when the Yankees staged their late-inning World Series dramatics just a subway ride away from the still-smoldering ground zero.

Ever since the Sept. 11 attacks, we’ve craved things that were normal. This nice summer evening in Orange County featured a medium-sized, well-behaved crowd at an Angel game.

What could be more normal than that?

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J.A. Adande can be reached at [email protected].