May 28 (Bloomberg) -- The boisterous lot lucky enough to experience yesterday’s Barcelona-Manchester United championship was reminiscent of the revelry in the right-field bleachers at the old Yankee Stadium whenever Manny Ramirez came home with the Boston Red Sox.

It didn’t matter that Manny didn’t wear pinstripes. He wasn’t the enemy. He was one of them.

The neighborhood always showed up en masse to support their Bronx-raised hero, banging their drums, waving their flags, blowing their whistles and idolizing the local kid turned superstar and multimillionaire.

The stands were filled with fun and energy. It was a carnival. Smiles all around. It’s what a sporting event is supposed to feel like.

It demonstrated the kind of emotional connection fans can forge when owners and players aren’t bickering over percentage points of revenue, or letting greed interfere and sometimes interrupt the games people give so much of themselves to support.

As I wrote earlier this month, too often in professional sports what happens in court trumps what happens on the court.

Speaking of the legal system, baseball fans everywhere, and not just in the Bronx, owe Sonia Sotomayor a debt of gratitude. Because of her, at least in part, baseball bounced back.

“Some say Judge Sotomayor saved baseball,” President Barack Obama, a fan of Chicago’s White Sox, said while introducing his first Supreme Court nominee the other day.

Strike Breaker

Sotomayor played a significant role in ending the Major League Baseball strike when she ruled against owners in their collective bargaining dispute with players.

It was, boiled down, billionaires versus millionaires. Each side wanted more.

Owners sought to unilaterally change work rules by ending free agency and salary arbitration. They also tried to centralize player negotiations at the commissioner’s office, a sort of single-entity structure that undoubtedly would have served to suppress salaries.

Back then Sotomayor spent hours grilling lawyers for both sides on the finer points of labor law. She ruled from the bench in 15 minutes.

“I hope that none of you assumed that my lack of knowledge of any intimate details of your dispute meant that I was not a baseball fan,” Sotomayor, who grew up in public housing three miles from Yankee Stadium, said that day. “You can’t grow up in the South Bronx without knowing about baseball.”

And let’s hope that, from here forward, kids in the poorest U.S. congressional district won’t be able to grow up without knowing all about the Yankees and Sotomayor, whose love of the law grew out of watching “Perry Mason” on television.

Dream Big

Let’s hope that little boys and girls know that someone just like them does belong, and can dream of -- and reach -- Princeton, Yale and the highest court in the land.

It’s important to note that Sotomayor’s ruling didn’t end the baseball impasse. But it did leave owners and players nowhere to go other than the bargaining table.

“It put pressure on both sides to be more reasonable and get things worked out,” says Gary Roberts, dean of the Indiana University School of Law - Indianapolis. “It was a very shrewd, pragmatic decision that ultimately saved the game.”

Sotomayor’s ruling implemented the previous work rules while management and well-paid labor hashed out an agreement. Baseball was back, allowing Cal Ripken Jr. to take the field again and again and again while Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa captivated a nation with their home-run chase, which we didn’t know at the time was tainted.

Baseball Renaissance

The fact is that baseball has enjoyed a renaissance, even in the face of artificially enhanced stars, including Ramirez, who is serving a 50-game suspension for violating baseball’s drug rules.

Obstacles aside, Commissioner Bud Selig has made globalization a priority. And the league’s new media arm is going gangbusters, allowing the Yankees and Mets to build new palaces and traditional small-market teams to at least compete for the best talent.

It’s a far, far cry from the anger and resentment of the 1994 strike, when the World Series was canceled.

Congressman Jose E. Serrano, whose district includes Yankee Stadium, told me he spilled “a lot of tears” watching Obama introduce Sotomayor.

“No one who lives here is rolling in money,” he said. “No one who lives here has servants.”

What the folks in the South Bronx do have is the Yankees. And Ramirez, who, if baseball’s schedule makers have any smarts, will lead his Los Angeles Dodgers into Yankee Stadium next season as part of interleague play.

On that day fans will bring their drums, whistles and dreadlock wigs. And let’s hope they come dressed in black robes as a means of paying homage to -- as J. Lo would say -- the girl from the block who grew up to save baseball.

(Scott Soshnick is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Scott Soshnick in New York at ssoshnick@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: May 28, 2009 00:01 EDT