Now fill your favorite four-letter word into the headline (and I don't mean 'feed' or 'hall').

Do you really care about either side? Do Richard Ravitch and the owners actually come across as more appealing than Donald Fehr and the players?

After all, it is the fans who once again have turned out the big losers because of yet another baseball strike.

We have thrown millions, perhaps billions of dollars into the coffers of these "gentlemen" and Marge Schott, and for the eighth time in 22 years, the players and owners have forgotten about us.

World War II didn't cancel the World Series. An earthquake in 1989 also didn't. Nothing since the first decade of the century has postponed the postseason, but now the collective greed of both sides has killed the Fall Classic.

Then again, it's just as well that the owners voted to cut out the playoffs last week--everyone should know that the only reason the strike would have been settled would have been so that they could collect the massive television revenue that the postseason generates.

After all, the only time either side concerns itself with the fans is when the fans don't fill up the stadiums.

Right now, the players and owners think we're dying to flush more money down the drain, i.e., their bank accounts. They think we are heart-broken (which we probably are to some extent), that our lives are incomplete without baseball.

Well, it's time for a change.

I don't plan on supporting them if they ever do settle, and neither should you. (I'll talk about how to strike back a little bit later.)

Why take such drastic action if we love baseball so much?

Without getting into who is right and wrong in the current situation, let's examine how devious each side is.

The players: HBO hit the bullseye with its "When It Was a Game" series several years ago. The show talked about the 1920's, '30s, '40s, '50s, and '60s, when it was an honor and it was fun to play a game called baseball.

Sure, wages were low. (Mickey Mantle or Ted Williams couldn't have made much more than the current minimum wage of $109,000.) But that didn't stop the players from playing.

It is obscene to think that people making an average of over $1.2 million a year (more than the average American will earn after 25 years of work) or median salary of over $500,000 can claim they aren't being paid enough money.