Baseball

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It's a fact No 3-4-5 trio in baseball has more RBIs than the White Sox's Frank Thomas, Magglio Ordonez and Paul Konerko. Big feat Tampa Bay's Jared Sandberg is the 39th player to hit 2 HRs in an inning. Uncle Ryne never did it. The number 23: Beginning this weekend, consecutive games in the state of Florida for the Marlins.

AFTER Al Campanis, then Los Angeles Dodgers general manager, said in 1987 that blacks lacked "the necessities" to hold high-level jobs in baseball, many thought the furor caused by that disgraceful remark would end the barriers that, for the most part, had kept minorities out of on-field and front-office management positions.Now, in his 1991 state-of-the-game speech, Major League Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent has a clear message for baseball club owners: When it comes to minority hiring in baseball "there is much more to do."

The only people more gullible than those who will return to see major league baseball games in person are those who believe people won't return to the stands at all.Those "rebels" who organized protest coalitions, those legions of fans who called up talk shows to vow their revenge on the game, those millions of disenchanted aficionados who muttered how millionaire spoiled-brat players and greedy owners wouldn't get their hard-earned money -- the majority of...

Finally, four weeks late, major league baseball returns to Camden Yards. That's joyous news for fans all over this region. The Orioles have emerged from baseball's shabby labor dispute in relatively good shape, off the field as well as on. Not so, everywhere else in the two leagues. The strike/lockout/civil war since last August has damaged the national pastime. What remains unclear as the season starts is how badly.Two consequences of the strike will be evident this afternoon on the field.

There is a third party to baseball's latest labor-management war, which the owners and players may be underestimating. The fans.Most experts discount fan displeasure because it has not seriously materialized in the last seven work stoppages. Yet given the mystical place baseball holds in our psyche, who knows what fan support would have been without the strikes and lockouts? Mystiques are not shatter-proof.For the ordinary fan, it's hard to muster sympathy for millionaire ballplayers and multi-millionaire owners.

LAST Thursday, baseball's most respected voice was silenced. Walter Lanier (Red) Barber, who died in Tallahassee, Fla., at 84, brought eloquence to language and appreciation to sport. For years he used radio to chat, as if he and his listeners were around a pot-bellied stove.Statistics show that Barber aired five All-Star Games and 13 World Series, covered baseball's first night game in 1935, and was the first broadcaster, with Mel Allen, to enter the Hall of Fame. They cannot show how the Ol' Redhead made almost existential pleasure of sport.

The New York Times said in an editorial Oct. 28:There was something unsettling about this year's World Series, and it arises from the nagging thought that the Florida Marlins, who seemed to come from nowhere to win in a riveting seventh game, may dissolve as quickly as they were put together.This is the age of impermanence in baseball, when free-agent players and free-market owners make it almost impossible to keep a team together. The Marlins are the apotheosis of the modern team, a transitory coalition cobbled together with shopping-spree logic.

A warm July night in 1995. A full house at Camden Yards. A big night at the yard. Maybe the biggest. Cal Ripken is surpassing Lou Gehrig's streak tonight. Mike Mussina takes the mound, warms up and throws the first pitch . . .. . . to Deion Sanders. Of the Atlanta Braves. Of the National League.Huh?You can't laugh it off, not anymore. Not with baseball's owners making noise about changing the structure of the game as it has existed for a century.Interleague play. Wild-card playoffs. A retooling of divisions and alignments.