There's not going to be a baseball strike. Well, whoop de freakin' doo. In the last few days I was actually rooting for a strike, just to see how upset fans could get at the players and how the game might suffer. I guess that's a bit of schadenfreude for you. Anyway, now that the two sides have reached a deal, and the game will go on, I realize something: it doesn't change anything for me. I'm still not going to pay any more attention to baseball than I do now. Which, unfortunately, is a lot more attention than I thought. You see, I went into the 2002 season pledging not to follow the Pirates too closely, or the pennant races, or the labor talks especially. What happened? I've read every article on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about the team, and I've followed the labor situation with a magnifying glass lately. But the fact is that no matter what kind of labor deal came out of this mess, it wouldn't make me care more or less about the game. I've never been able to play baseball on any level, I don't know the rules or the history well enough to talk about it, and I don't care to learn about any of that. I like going to the occasional big league game. Otherwise, I'm always going to be a football fan, and no matter what happens in that game, on or off the field, I'm always going to watch the Steelers on Sundays. Even if they never win the Super Bowl again in my lifetime and run off ten straight losing seasons. I should have known this all along. When I was a kid, I never fantasized about being in the Pirates lineup and hitting a home run to win the World Series, but I always wanted to be Terry Bradshaw and throw the winning touchdown pass in the Super Bowl.

I'm a casual baseball fan, even where my team is concerned, but I will always be a fanatic about football. And that's not a bad thing at all.