I’ve taken a little bit of time to stop and reflect on the state of baseball and the lockout we find ourselves in the midst of. For Arizona Diamondbacks fans, this is a first. The first time since the franchise was awarded that there has been a work stoppage. Let that sink in a little. The Arizona Diamondbacks and the Tampa Bay Rays (then the Devil Rays) were awarded franchises on March 9, 1995. This occurred after the last work stoppage that washed away the post season and World Series for the first time. By the time the Diamondbacks and Rays started play in 1998, the strike of 1994 was a fading memory made so by the heroics of Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire who were battling to break the single-season home run record.

1998 was a year of euphoria. Not only had baseball come to two new markets with all of the pomp and circumstance but by midsummer the world was fascinated by the home run hitting of Sosa and McGwire. Television shows were interrupted to bring you individual at-bats and every day baseball fans and non-fans alike would scour the newspaper, television, and sports radio to find out what happened the night before. It was a renaissance of the game. Fans who had vowed to boycott the game due to work stoppages were now back at the ballpark and all seemed to be forgiven.

The players association and the owners seemed to have learned their lesson that through there tenuous relationship it was possible to destroy the game. Instead of the constant bickering about labor issues, the two sides seemed to work together to at least show a united public front. This resulted in relatively smooth labor agreements over the next 27 years. This is why it is such a disappointment to see that the two sides could not come to some kind of agreement before December 1.

As the deadline for an agreement passed, the owners immediately locked out the players. While Commissioner Manfred claimed this was simply a procedural mechanism to make sure the players would come back to the bargaining table, that description did not resonate with the press and fans who saw this more like when you are in a relationship that seems to be nearing an end and you want to make sure that you break up with your partner before they break up with you.

Starting with the lockout, the traditional hot stove off-season where you eagerly watched to see what moves your favorite team would make in an effort to build a winning team for the upcoming season was replaced with constant reminders that without an agreement baseball would disappear. First it would affect the off-season stopping all player movement. Next would be the postponement of spring training then finally the elimination of regular season games.

In what I can only describe as irony on a universal scale, I decided to take a break from trying to understand why the players and owners couldn’t just reach an agreement and instead watch a movie. I flipped through the channels and stopped when I came across the 1968 classic Planet of the Apes. For those of you who have never seen this movie (and I can’t imagine why you haven’t), let me give you a brief synopsis with a bit of a spoiler. Hey, if you haven’t seen the movie in 53 years, you deserve to have the ending ruined for you and I’m not going to feel bad.

The premise of the movie is that a series of astronauts from 1972 crash on an unknown planet that is inhabited by an evolved group of apes that rule the planet in the year 3978. Man is recognized as an animal that cannot even be domesticated. The apes walk, talk, and reason in a relatively advanced form of government. Man is caught, caged, and used for experiments by their ape masters. The addition of intelligent men in the form of these astronauts causes some of the ape scientists to question whether ape evolved from man. The ape government establishment views the astronauts as threats to their society and attempt to destroy them. They are successful in this except for Taylor played by Charlton Heston.

The ending of the movie has become a classic. Little did I realize that what the ending was really talking about is baseball. After Charlton Heston escapes from his ape captors, he and a female human escape by horseback and ride along the ocean coastline. Suddenly the horst stops and Heston stares at something out of frame. He drops to his knees and utters the immortal line, “You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! God damn you all to hell!” The camera pans out to show a half buried Statue of Liberty leaving the viewer to understand that the astronauts landed back on earth and the human society had imploded and destroyed everything.

I sat there staring at the television unable to process my emotions. The greed and arrogance of the owners and the players were represented by the human society that fought amongst itself until Armageddon was unleashed destroying everything that had been built and left the landscape barren. The apes represent other sports picking up the pieces in hopes of building something better without repeating the failures of man. We as sports fans are Taylor, kneeling in front of the once great Statue of Liberty left to deal with the aftermath knowing this could all have been avoided.

Baseball seriously needs to get its house in order. If I am left watching old movies and equating that to the state of America’s pastime this is not going to end well for anyone. And I cannot afford the amount of therapy it is going to take to get me over this frustration and grief.