European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - September 07, 1994, Darmstadt, Hesse                                A wednesday september 7, 1994 commentary the stars and stripes Page 13 this May be foul deed that does baseball in this year major league baseball owners revamped the two leagues into three divisions adding wild card teams to an extra round of postseason play so More teams would play meaningful sep tember games. Said one owner before in september Michigan played notre Dame and baseball was relegated to the Back of the sports  the owners fixed that. This saturday notre Dame plays Michigan and base Ball is not in the Back pages. It has disappeared. It will return someday but never will be what twas. Both owners and players Are broadly disdained by fans increasingly disinclined to regard baseball As oxygen essential. But fans at first marginally partial to the George f. Will owners Side increasingly under stand that the owners or a con trolling Cabal of them Are the aggressors demanding Large changes in the status quo of baseball s compensation system and that the players struck defensively to avoid unilateral imposition of changes by ownership. Since the strike started the own ers who say their strained circumstances justify demanding that players accept a salary Cap have been unable to agree among themselves about How Man teams Are losing Money or to argue Plau Sibly that baseball As a whole is. Base Ball s last expansion fee was $95 million per team and will be higher next time. To speak As economists do that sum rep resents the discounted present value of the anticipated profits Stream which can hardly be negative. The players see the salary Cap As injurious to a hard won right that of free Agency. By striking they Are absorbing financial losses they will never recoup in order to protect the future earnings of subsequent generations. The owners Piave overworked one pedal on their Organ the fact that the average major league salary is $1.2 million. But the median Sal Ary is $410,000, and because there Are seven times More minor leagues than major leagues the minor league mini mum salary is $700 a month for a five month season the median salary of professional baseball players probably is less than $10,000 year. The owners having waited until late to submit the provocative and shopworn salary Cap idea and having changed their internal rules to allow any High owners Tob lock a settlement evidently want a Long strike. But what then Here s what. This season and postseason Proba Bly Are lost. Advertisers and fans Are finding other interests. The off season with its trades and talk is More important to baseball than any other sport. It i called the hot stove league because it contributes to the conversation that is scentral to the baseball fan s fun. This Winter the stove will be Stone cold. Base Ball is completing its ruinous transformation into just another entertainment option. Note the word that is the Root of the word  the National pastime is partaking of the National carelessness about the conservation of institutions. Baseball s tra vails Are not As imports of say courts , but they Are illustrative of a generic frivolous Ness. Columnist Leonard Koppett one of baseball s Wisest chroniclers notes this attention getting arithmetic assume realistically that baseball Sells 70 million tickets a year and assume conservatively that the average customer makes five Ballpark visits. That Means 14 million North americans actually go to games and 276 million Don t. Some entertainment such As major television programming is of potential interest to the general population. Base Ball in t. It is supported by baseball fans who Are sustained by their sense that baseball is special. That sense is rooted in the feeling that although the sport is business it also is part of the rhythm of their lives and the fabric of their nation history. This is Why the involvement of baseball fans with their sport is different in kind and intensity from the involve ment of people with  and basketball. Bob Costas of Abc who should be base Ball commissioner understands. Basebal1,he says is a pastime not a spectacle. You can watch an nil or Aba game for the sheer self contained spectacle. But in base Ball the sport with the most history and continuity and in which both matter most enjoyment is to a considerable extent con Tingent on a special kind of caring which derives from the sense of the sport s specialness As an institution. Speaking of continuity Costas suggests half whimsically letting the strike run to next aug. 12, and picking up the 1994 season then with mat Williams at 43 Home runs and Tony Gwynn at.393. Baseball s connection with it fans has been remarkably durable but is not indestructible. As Costas says pre Vious discontinuities have bruised the connection but this one May rupture  Anderson manager of the Detroit As baseball old timers say once observed we try every Way we can to kill the game but for some reason nothing no body does never hurts  Sparky spoke too soon. C Washington Post Clinton finds forty years ago this month on sept. 30, 1950,president Truman approved one of the most important documents of this Century. Called Nsc-68, it was the result of a study by the state and defense departments that Truman had ordered earlier that year. Directed bythe state department s Paul Nitze the study was to undertake a re examination of our objectives in peace and War and of the effect of these objectives on our strategic plans in the Light of the. Possible Thermo nuclear bomb capability of the soviet  but it had another Mission As Well. As Nitze revealed in a Winter 1994, article in strategic review the de Bate on purpose involved the question of the contemplated audience for the report. Whom were we trying to influence Secretary of state Dean Acheson late stated that the report was directed at the american people that its purpose had been to convince the pub Lic of the significance of the soviet threat and the Nee for increased defense spending in  although Nitze notes that Nsc-68 was not actually made Public until 1975, the korean War that broke Outin june 1950 two months after the draft of Nsc-68 had been completed eliminated the need for a pub Lic affairs Campaign to sell the american people and Congress of the study s Validity. The same Congress that had difficulty finding $13 billion for the defense budget in april 1950 found $22.3 billion the following August. The course of the cold War had been set. Nsc-68 was Long ago overtaken by events including the dissolution of the soviet Union and the end of the Era of thermonuclear confrontation that the document was set out to address. But As Nitze said earlier this year the ideas behind Nsc-68, the need for an organized approach to . Security policy remains As valid today As it was after the War or at any other time. N affairs a foreign subject there is less consensus today among americans about the direction of . Foreign policy and Security policy than there was at the end of world War ii. . Objectives and its world role seen  today president Clinton faces Many of the Sam problems in the Post cold War world that Truman faced in the Post world War ii world. Then As now there was a search for peace dividends after the enormous expenditures of the War. Then As now the military forces that won the War had largely been demobilized. Then As now a War weariness Amon the american people had put a Damper on . Foreign an military policies abroad. And then As now the collective Security arrangements with which the War had been won were endanger of coming unglued and even Pax Brittana the bulwark of . Defences for Over a Cen Tury had collapsed. But tru Man had an advantage that thank god Clinton lacks. Depend on it sir wrote Samuel Johnson in 1777, when a Man knows he is to be hanged in a fort night it concentrates his mind  the knowledge that the soviet Union had acquired the nuclear bomb and perhaps the thermonuclear bomb gave an urgency to Nsc-68 that is lacking today. Five years after the end of world War ii a new strategic direction was in place. Nealy five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold War the United states is still floundering. Harry g. Summers the widespread controversy set off by the drafts of presidential decision directive-13 which was sup posed to set the direction of foreign and military policy for the new world order has ended up As one staffer put it As an Albatross around the administration s neck. The May 1994 Pdd-25 on peacekeeping policy while a step in the right direction was not even a Shadow of the formidable Nsc-68, which guided . For eign and military policy for the next generation. And it did t help matters any when Clinton publicly already has repudiated one of Pdd-25 s key provisions. The document says that before . Troops were eve committed to action it would be determined that Domestic and congressional support exists or can be marshalled but Clinton said on National television that he would commit troops in Haiti whether or not Congress approved. In defining its Security policy Nitze said the United states must address some fundamental questions about How it deals with the world 1 what should Pur role in foreign affairs be 2 what objectives should our International efforts serve 3 what sort of Means should we employ in seeking those objectives these deceptively simple questions Are no easier to answer today than they were in 1950 they involve building a consensus first Between the state and de sense departments and then with the White House a difficult task then and now. Then the consensus has Tobe sold to the Congress and As with Nsc-68, to the american people. All we need Are latter Day Dean Acheson and Paul Sitzes to think these problems through. C los Angeles times