Baseball Under Murdoch: a Game or Just a Product?

Rich pannings in the gold fields of conspiracy await anyone willing to believe that the evil geniuses of subliminal Saturday morning cartoons of the early 1960s were the Commies.

Not only were American kids riveted to the tube instead of toiling weekends on science projects that might one day close the missile gap, but what we watched on TV led us so far astray from the laws of physics that we’d be lucky to understand the workings of a mousetrap, much less a manned rocket:

A cartoon rabbit who had a safe dropped on his head from the top of a building had only to pop out from under and brush off his fur. A cartoon roadrunner flattened by a steamroller simply inflated himself back into shape by blowing on his own thumb. (We didn’t learn much animal anatomy either.)

But here’s the real Iron Curtain/Kremlin Komrade part. In every cartoon I saw, every item, every bit of paraphernalia, was made by a company called Acme. Acme dynamite. Acme umbrellas. Acme disguises. Acme socket wrenches.

If that wasn’t socialism, Donald Trump held the pink slip to Red Square.

In America 1997, RJR makes cookies and cigarettes. GE makes refrigerators and NBC. Lockheed Martin makes aerospace stuff, duns deadbeat dads, collects parking fines and processes nuclear waste.

Carl’s wants to buy out Hardee’s, Staples and Office Depot long to merge, Mattel marries Tyco, Ralphs eats Alpha Beta, Crocker is First Interstate is Wells Fargo, Tinkers is Evers is Chance. Acme Burgers, Acme Paper and Pens, Acme Toys, Acme Food, Acme Bank.

So . . . how ‘bout those Acme Dodgers?

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The man who may buy the Los Angeles Dodgers is the richest man in Los Angeles. Rupert Murdoch’s $3.2 billion, says the Business Journal, is 10 times the fortune of that other media fellow who owns a baseball team, Gene Autry.

Murdoch’s billions, like McDonald’s, come from around the world. His U.S. companies own TV Guide, the Fox network and its moviemaking sibling; newspapers, cable and broadcast TV operations; publishers of books from novels to textbooks. In Britain and his native Australia, more of the same.

But he’s American now. For foreigners, owning more than 25% of a U.S. TV station is against the law, and as soon as Murdoch swore his citizenship oath in 1985, he invested in $2 billion worth of TV stations in his new country.

Having covered multitudes of immigrants and refugees--from communism, from fascism, from poverty and death squads and ritual female genital mutilation--I can imagine Murdoch’s feelings at escaping Australian tyranny. He was “grateful� to his new country, he said, and this gratitude did not only enrich him; he offered the speaker of the House, the man two heartbeats from the presidency, a $4.5-million book advance.

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On the nights when a home game is underway, the circle of lights that burns atop Chavez Ravine is like the crown of blazing candles that young Swedish girls wear on the St. Lucia festival Dec. 13.

Whatever you think of baseball--and I think it writes better than it plays, and would rather read “The Natural� than watch a no-hitter--the Dodgers, like the Music Center, were a rite of passage from L.A. the town and L.A. the city.

The second year the team was here, when it went to the World Series, Vin Scully told every fan to blow the car horn, and cacophony erupted from the harbor to the Valley.

Events in England reserve a royal box for the monarch; here, we need a loyal box, for the likes of Roz Wyman, who helped to make the deal that got the Dodgers here. One thing she insisted on was making the team and the land it played on a package deal: No owner could take his ball and go home--or to Baltimore or Phoenix--without taking the stadium into account.

So Rupert Murdoch will have to come to Chavez Ravine, as he came to America.

What will he bring with him to Dodger Stadium? Not, surely, the down-market tackiness of his tabloids--the topless woman on Page 3, the “wacko Jacko� Michael Jackson headlines. Worry, rather, whether the seats will stay affordable, the stadium will stay green and pleasant, and not be overrun by luxury corporate boxes at the expense of the team’s lunch-bucket loyalists. Worry that the team keeps its city and its character, that baseball stays a game and not a corporate product. Worry about a mergermania that may leave the nation’s only competition on its baseball diamonds.

Rupert Murdoch will be--already is--the richer for being an American and an Angeleno. So worry, at last, that Los Angeles ought to be the richer for him.