Of course, baseball players don’t wear sneakers, and the market for cleats is small, because unlike Air Jordans, you can’t wear them to the office. But the real issue is baseball’s increasingly tenuous hold on the popular imagination. “There’s so much lack of interest in baseball that we discuss the lack of interest almost every week on the show,” says ABC and ESPN sportscaster Dick Schapp. The 28 majorleague teams have failed to produce a single figure with the nationwide credibility to endorse soda pop, let alone a product of some complexity, like fax machines. Advertising Age recently reported that of more than 600 major-league players there is exactly one with a national endorsement contract for a product other than sporting gear. It’s Nolan Ryan, the oldest player in baseball, for Advil pain reliever.

How is this possible? In the most significant and intimate decisions of modern life-the choice of a hamburger restaurant or long-distance carrier–can Americans really prefer the advice of Shaquille O’Neal, a 21-year-old center on a team that didn’t even exist five years ago, to that of the man who occupies the most revered position in American life, center fielder for the New York Yankees … Bernie Williams? Well, that’s part of the answer right there: the whole sport is in a charisma slump. Run down the 1992 All-Star roster, and once you get past Bip Roberts and Darren Daulton, who’s left but Travis Fryman and Craig Biggio? “It’s a fairly dull list for commercial value,” concedes Martin Blackman, whose company, Blackman and Raber, consults with advertisers on which athletes to hire. The general run of personalities extends from boring to surly. Roger Clemens? “He’s controversial, he’s acerbic, he doesn’t have much personality.” (Clemens once warned reporters that if they kept writing about his home life “somebody’s gonna get hurt.”) Outfielder Barry Bonds? “He’s seen as a complainer.” (Bonds indignantly rejected a $36 million offer from the Yankees.) David Cone? “You’ve heard of him,” Blackman says delicately, “but not in the right way.” (A lawsuit charging that Cone masturbated in front of two women at Shea Stadium was the latest reminder to fans that not all players are in it just for the money.)

Of course, most of them are in it for the money. That’s true in most other sports also, but baseball’s Milkenesque salaries-Bonds settled for nearly $44 million from the San Francisco Giants-seem especially glaring. For one thing, the eight-figure contracts often come when a star leaves his team and signs on with someone else, an exercise of free enterprise that still strikes many fans as singularly mercenary. Basketball players also make millions, but for various technical reasons–such as the overall team salary cap in the NBA-teams have less incentive to lure away competitors’ stars. Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Patrick Ewing all have played for just one team.

There is also a certain undefinable resentment that baseball players attract by their very ordinariness. To put on a pair of pants in the morning is to be reminded that you’re no Michael Jordan. But how many men have looked at the Phillies’ John Kruk and said, Hey, I’m almost as fat as him-what did he do to get $2.4 million last year? OK, besides hit.323? In my own case, I can live with knowing that even though I’m a better writer than .278 hitter Joe Orsulak is an outfielder, I will never make anywhere near his $650,000 salary. What rankles me is the suspicion that I’m also a better outfielder.

But Orsulaks come and they go; baseball’s problems may be greater than the sum of its nonentities. Its strength is also its weakness: it has a corner on the market for nostalgic, romantic sports hooey, but spectators increasingly favor basketball’s fast-paced, trash-talking, macho hooey. In four hours of sports broadcasts one recent evening, I was solicited by Michael Jordan three times, Shaquille O’Neal, Karl Malone, Hubert Davis and assorted football players and coaches going back to Joe Namath. I even saw a hockey player and Jimmy Connors. But the only baseball player I saw was a kid, striking out to end a Little League game.

It was, however, a commercial for a nationally advertised, nonsports product. It was a commercial for minoxidil.