How to remember Sept. 11 -- and how not to

I'm veering here into the merits of the strike and the justifiability of the salaries, and neither is the point. Humility is the point. Remembrance is the point. Solemnity is the point. Sept. 17 is the point.

What the baseball players have forgotten in targeting Sept. 16 as a probable strike deadline, at least according to some news accounts, is that last year, Sept. 17 was the day the baseball season resumed. In the ensuing weeks, the game did more for the country than it had in generations. Last Sept. 17, baseball actually played a part, however small, in binding a nation's wounds.

I can summon effortlessly from my memory an image of an NYPD officer standing outside the New York Stock Exchange that morning. There was still so much smoke downtown that until I got within a few feet of him, I couldn't tell whether he was wearing glasses. I was there covering the aftermath for a Los Angeles radio station, but the officer wanted to talk baseball. I finally interrupted him and gestured at the stockbrokers walking up the center of the street as if to a concentration camp. "You don't understand," the cop replied. "I can get through this because I know that tonight at 7 o'clock I can put my feet up and watch the Mets and pretend they matter."

This Sept. 17 could very easily be the first full day of a strike, the first full day of empty stadiums and re-embittered fans. To paraphrase Abba Eban: Major League Baseball never fails to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Incidentally, the material costs of a strike starting Sept. 16 and wiping out the entire post-season have been kept under wraps, but they are fairly easy to calculate. Collectively, major league players make about $12,035,714 per day. Their share of the post-season kitty is another $40 million. They could be out a total of $208 million.

As for the owners, Sal Galatioto of Lehman Brothers is perhaps the leading sports financial analyst in the country. He crunched the data he had -- all the nontelevision stuff -- for me. During our theoretical strike, the owners would lose $238 million in the regular season, and another $180 million in the post-season. The TV income, he didn't know.

Somebody else did -- somebody who had a copy of the contract between baseball and Fox. It turns out that just over 90 percent of that deal is for the post-season, so if there's no World Series, baseball owes Fox a rebate or refund of $300 million.

Put them all together and they spell a management loss of $718 million. But that's a minimum figure, and the reason for the possibility of an even higher one is perhaps the most fascinating element of the entire post-attacks entertainment economy. Fox got included in the deal a damages clause for lost advertising revenue. So if a strike wipes out the post-season, and Fox makes, say, a dollar for commercial time during some terrible rerun, instead of the $10 they could've gotten for the patriotism festival that is the World Series, they can submit a claim to an arbitrator, and baseball could be forced to pay the network as much as $230 million more, bringing the total loss to close to $1 billion.

With our luck, those reruns will be of this season's so-far disappointing "Sex and the City," which is over there at the other end of the Appropriate Taste spectrum. When it comes to Sept. 11, where baseball apparently took Mayor Giuliani's admonition to "go on with your (greedy) lives" too literally, the maestros of the Sarah Jessica Parker vehicle apparently ignored it, and are still stuck in the "the entire world has changed forever" mode.

If the last 10 months have shown us anything, it's that Americans are ready to bite whatever bullets come our way. But in between painful moments of real life, we'd like our entertainment to actually be, well, entertaining, thank you -- escapist if at all possible. What a relief it was, then, to see "Sex and the City" premiere last Sunday on HBO: the ultimate escapist show that flourishes because of charm and brilliant execution.

But the new 9/11-ready "Sex and the City" could not have been more heavy-handed in its desire to be "relevant" and "meaningful" had it stuck a Dan Rather newscast in the middle of the program. Depth was sought by designating New York City itself as Carrie's first love. Gotham's economic revitalization was encouraged by having the characters jettison the first mother of the bunch, Miranda, into a waiting taxi while the rest of them headed downtown for their compulsive shopping. And patriotism was introduced by forcing the three gals to chase sailors during Fleet Week, and even have Charlotte flash one of them.

What? Did nobody think of having Samantha swim out to troop ships?

The "Sex and the City" effort to make entertainment sensitive to the slightly new world around us is clearly more earnest and more commendable than the ballplayers' return to "Me first, and screw you if you think you're even second." Nonetheless, as a born-and-bred New Yorker who still can't listen to tapes of the radio reporting I did from here last year, my thanks, my applause for your intent, and these final four words to the show's producers:

More Sex, less City.

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