Major League Baseball was able to avert a work stoppage a few weeks ago by coming to an agreement that would keep players on the field at least through the 2006 season. And I, as a die-hard baseball fan who grew up swinging an old Easton bat and busting out windows with a tennis ball, couldn't care less.

Professional baseball is dead to me.

Many seasons ago, before the unfortunate death of the game, I can remember going to a Jiffy Lube or some such place out in the east end of York to get Billy Ripken's autograph on an overcast April Saturday morning before an evening game the Orioles probably lost. Cal's brother was never a star, but he was a really cool guy to meet, especially for an 8-year-old aspiring Baltimore Oriole like me.

Seeing Billy sign a picture of himself and hand it across the table to me -- along with the up-the-middle-single I hit in the bottom of the seventh inning to knock Gettysburg out of the Legion playoffs about 10 summers later -- are probably my two most enduring baseball moments.

As a one-time fan and student of the sport, I have to point out that neither of my great moments have anything to do with my team signing a hot-shot free agent, or a player demanding to be traded to a bigger market. My ideal baseball is a baseball that embraces its history and sand-lot moorings, not one that functions in spite of it.

You could say the Billy Ripken autograph session was a front-office marketing tactic to drum up support for a bad team in the York area (only about an hour north of Baltimore), but Billy was never the type of player the Os could march out to a Susquehanna Valley outpost and expect thousands of people to show up to see. I think my dad and I waited in line for about 10 minutes to get his signature.

It's a great picture as I remember, of Billy fielding a routine grounder at second, with his knees bent and glove on the ground in textbook fashion -- the beauty of Ripken baseball fundamentals. But who really cares now that the game is dead?

What the baseball industry has forgotten is that the fans are the only normal, working people left in the process. Players don't "work" for a living the same way that not a single front-office decision maker "works" for a living.

Team-wide endorsements and television deals, along with years of slowly gauging the patrons of the game have inflated a few large market enterprises into behemoths (N.Y. Yankees) and turned about twice as many into lame-duck wastelands (Milwaukee and Montreal), which can only afford second- or third-rate talent. Over-expansion has brought teams to undeserving and unwanting areas (Tampa Bay) and diluted a once rich pool of talent.

My "what's wrong with baseball this week" rap sheet reminds me of the Billy Joel classic, "We Didn't Start The Fire." I could create lyrics for the decades as greed and decay set in, putting into words the downfall of the great American game.

In this vein, the present-day solutions are essentially pointless.

A salary cap isn't going to solve anything. It's not even a cap. It's a "suggested end point" for team payrolls. You can go over the "salary cap," but you have to pay a "luxury tax" for being a rich team. But if you are a rich team that can afford to break the cap, what does a luxury tax really mean?

It means that front offices will just cut fan promotion nights, or continue to increase seat prices, or concessions prices, or some other price.

The fan always pays the final price, at the end of the line, as he chomps on a $7 hot dog. Baseball professionals of the modern era are bigger and stronger and apparently less aware of who came before them than ever before.

The wounds of the 1994 strike were still visible to many fans, but the players were ready to walk out again this year. Their "demands" are heard by out-of-touch owners who either spend like they're feeding a fire or pinch every quarter until the eagle screams. And it is exactly the collusion of these two entities that makes me say the professional game is dead.

This death forces me to think not of the monetary value of my Billy Ripken autograph when I look at it, because to focus on such a trite aspect of my collector's item would make me no better than those I'm talking about.

The Billy Ripken picture makes me think instead of a time not long ago when there was something simple and pure, like a textbook grounder to second, worth saving in the game. Goodbye, Billy and Cal.