Baseball's new order has message for football

America's baseball season starts tomorrow. At last, throwing a curve ball will mean just that, after its deployment by at least one CBS war correspondent as a metaphor for certain military strategies in the march on Baghdad. Perhaps this was for the benefit of President Bush, former owner of the Texas Rangers, who certainly knows a curve ball when he sees one, but has a less sure hold on the intricacies of warfare.

Actually, there is a more tangible link between baseball, and the war in Iraq. The season was scheduled to start last week, with a game in Tokyo between the Seattle Mariners and the Oaklands A's. But that showdown was cancelled on account of the "international situation".

For years there has been a striking discrepancy between America's commercial and military imperialism, for want of a better word, and its sporting introspection. Baseball might import the odd Japanese pitcher, football the odd Aussie Rules star, basketball the odd Chinese giant, but really those three bulwarks of American sport are cheerfully impervious to foreign influences, and happy enough for foreign countries to remain impervious to them.

Still, the arrangement to kick off the baseball season in Japan, which has happened before, at least acknowledges a world beyond the Monterey peninsula. Watching a knowledgeable Japanese baseball crowd might also help the average mid-western Joe to realise that the World Series is the sporting misnomer of all time – although, to be fair, the term derives from sponsorship of the event 100 years ago by The World newspaper. It doesn't mean, or at any rate didn't mean, that baseball fans think whoever rules America rules the world.

Whatever, the war has torpedoed the Tokyo curtain-raiser. Americans don't travel when the overseas situation is "fluid", especially when its fluidity is down to them. They might be more pro-Brit than ever before, but their feelings of solidarity don't actually extend to packing the Burberry mac and crossing the Atlantic. The British tourist industry, so reliant on American patronage, is another unfortunate victim of collateral damage.

But baseball goes on. And this will be a fascinating season, not least because it is the first season to be shaped by the new Labor Agreement.

Now, don't turn the page, thinking that the machinations of baseball are of no interest over here, because they are.

In a nutshell, the Labor Agreement means a redistribution of wealth, and the Football Association and Football League, if not perhaps the Premier League, ought to be looking hard to see whether it works. For example, a so-called payroll tax has been initiated, whereby if a team's wage bill exceeds a certain level, it must contribute to an overflow fund which is then circulated among the poorer teams. I'm no economist but I think that's what's known as the trickledown effect, and with the vision and the will I see no reason why it shouldn't happen here... which is to say that I see every reason why it won't happen here.

The team hit hardest by the Labor Agreement is of course the New York Yankees, the Manchester United of baseball. Not that it has stopped the Yankees spending, just as it would not stop United. As it happens, the team's two high-profile acquisitions for this season are both foreigners.

One is an outfielder, Hideki Matsui, who hit 50 home runs in Japan last season. The other is Jose Contreras, a Cuban pitcher of indeterminate age but manifest talent. The Yankees under-achieved disastrously last season, not even making it through the first round of the play-offs, but this time, as usual, they are the team to beat.

The other issue looming large in baseball is drug use. Last month, at the beginning of spring training, the Baltimore Orioles pitcher, Steve Bechler, dropped dead. He, like Shane Warne, had been taking a weight-loss drug. But the difference between baseball and cricket, in this case, is that in baseball the drug remains legal. The authorities, who have addressed the sport's financial implosion with commendable rigour, must now deal just as rigorously with drugs.

It was ever thus, at least in the sense that baseball's problems reflected those facing American society. I have just re-read, as I do every couple of years, Jules Tygiel's brilliant 1983 book, Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy. And I noted that it is exactly 50 years since the sport sent shockwaves through the nation with the wholesale introduction into the major leagues of black players, a process which had started in 1947 with Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

By the 1960s, a black comedian was able to quip, famously, that "baseball has been wonderful for my people. Where else could a Negro shake a stick at a white man and 50,000 people cheer?" It was in the sporting arena that the Afro-American first found egalitarianism, hearing the crowd roar just as loudly for him as it did for a white man. Similarly, when captured black soldiers are paraded on Iraqi television, America's indignation takes no account of their colour. Which I suppose is progress of a sort.

b.viner@independent.co.uk