Short seasons shortchange fans

I usually pick up an NFL preview magazine at this time of year to help me scout the landscape for the coming season. I don’t think I’ll bother this year.
I did check out one season preview issue the other day. But, just as I expected, the rosters aren’t accurate. The last-minute flurry of player signings and roster changes brought about by the NFL lockout have rendered the magazines as behind the times as my technology skills.
That’s one annoying bit of fallout from the lockout. But at least there will be an NFL season. That’s more than we can say for certain about the NBA at this point.
As a fan, I used to find these labour stoppages among the professional sports I follow extremely irritating. It irked me to no end when the baseball strike of 1981 wiped out one third of the season, and I was really ticked off in 1994 when the Montreal Expos sported the best record in the major leagues, only to have the season come to a sudden stop. There wasn’t even a World Series played that year, the first time that had happened since 1904.
The NFL had its own abbreviated season in 1982 when a 57-day strike led to a shortened schedule of just nine games. But at least they played the post-season.
The NBA also had a season cut short in 1998-99 after a lockout which was followed by a 50-game regular season instead of the usual 82 games, followed by the post-season.
The NHL is the only major pro league to have lost an entire season to a labour dispute, when the 2004-05 campaign was cancelled. It marked the first time the Stanley Cup was not awarded since 1919, when the Spanish flu epidemic was in full force. The NHL also had a season shortened by labour strife in 1994-95 when the schedule was cut down to 48 games.
Each time, I was annoyed but resumed following the leagues once the two sides had kissed and made up. But, being the statistics nut that I am, these shortened seasons always bug me because they skew the stats. As a fan, I feel ripped off. I also feel used.
What I would like to see happen in these cases is for large numbers of fans to mount their own strike against these pro leagues that play so cavalierly with fans’ hearts in their squabbling over who gets the bigger the piece of the multi-billion-dollar pie, the owners or the players.
The truth is that pro sports wouldn’t exist if fans weren’t willing to fork over their hard-earned money to watch these athletes perform. But that is quickly forgotten when the billionaire owners and the millionaire players get their noses out of joint and start arguing over how to divvy up the loot.
But every time the owners and players of a pro sports league hold a season for ransom, the fans — including me — always rush back once the squabble has ended.
And that’s what allows the owners and players to treat the fans with such disrespect. They know we’ll come back. We always do.
Just once, I’d like to teach them a lesson and not go back.
But I’m not that strong. Darn it.