Baseball

Washington. -- Poor Cleveland. The Indians have not been in a World Series for 40 years and have not finished within 10 games of first for 35 years. Lately they have been in first, but a players' strike may truncate the season, preventing the World Series.The players' average salary is $1.2 million but the median salary is just $410,000, not so much for people with short careers at the peak of a $1.8 billion industry. The players may strike not to enforce new demands but to protect the status quo, under which this year they will get 58 percent of baseball's gross revenues, up from 41 percent just five years ago.Nineteen owners say they are losing money as the 28 teams earn their significantly unequal portions of the $1.8 billion in revenues -- a sum until recently beyond the dreams of baseball avarice.

As Fox begins its third season of baseball telecasts this weekend, it appears that the confluence of a lot of little things is adding up to a big break for the network.To recap, in returning the Saturday afternoon "Game of the Week," Fox officials met with a bit of indifference in the first two years, both in a ratings sense and from some players such as Atlanta's Greg Maddux and the Orioles' Mike Mussina, who were occasionally slow to climb aboard the network's attempts to bring new technology to the telecasts.

By the time World War II finally was over, the 50th anniversary of which will be marked next Monday and Tuesday, Hank Greenberg had been back swatting baseballs for the Detroit Tigers for about six weeks.The typical reaction to this might be, it figures, a ballplayer getting preferential treatment. Nothing could be further from the truth in the case of Greenberg and scores of others of the 442 big-league ballplayers who served during the Big War.It was in October of 1940, more than a year before our entry into the global conflict, that more than 16 million American men between the ages of 21 and 35 were ordered to register for the first peacetime draft in U.S. history.

You wake up on a summer morning, the smell of possibility in the air, and you feel slim and gifted and innocent, and you should mow the lawn, but as Walt Whitman said, "What is the grass? It is the handkerchief of the Lord, a scented gift." And who would cut God's hanky? Not you. Time to set aside the drudgery of home maintenance and go off in search of the incomparable wonders of this world. Nebulae spiral in the sky thousands of centuries away, the Mississippi flows round the bend, ripe tomatoes hang on the vine, and also there is baseball.

If good humor were all it took to vanquish the anger baseball fans feel toward a sport whose participants engaged themselves in an 7 1/2 -month long hissing match that settled next to nothing, then the task would be complete.Major League Baseball, for instance, launches its marketing campaign, titled "Welcome to the Show," which is expected to draw on the wacky side of the game, during tonight's Los Angeles Dodgers-Florida Marlins opener (7:30, ESPN).ESPN, which has the most to lose in terms of ratings in the early part of the season because it is the only nationally oriented regular baseball broadcaster, has debuted a funny bit during which a beautiful woman "morphs" into John Kruk over the narration of Billy Crystal.

Hot-stove baseball's fires are burning in January with the latest issue of Baseball America. The publication's college baseball preview showcases Severna Park's Mark Teixeira.Teixeira, who played at Mount St. Joseph and was The Sun's Metro Player of the Year last spring, setting state career records for homers (29) and RBIs (108), is a freshman third baseman at Georgia Tech. He is the subject of a feature article in Baseball America.Ranked No. 9 in the publication's preseason Top 20, the Yellow Jackets and coach Danny Hall are expecting big things from Teixeira, a ninth-round draft choice of the Boston Red Sox in June.

War is too important to be left to the generals, French Premier Georges Clemenceau once said. Is it time to wonder whether baseball is too important to be left to its owners?Viewed even through friendly eyes, the national pastime is in disarray. Whether it's the kind of commissioner they want, how to negotiate with the players union or individual free agents, disciplining Cincinnati owner Marge Shott for racist comments, the owners seem not to know where they're heading. Attendance is slumping and TV revenues, life-blood of their treasuries, are about to tumble.

THE LAST time truly major-league baseball was played in this country 10 big cities played host to 16 teams that were split into two leagues concentrated in seven states and the District of Columbia. Then the advent of television and the flight to the suburbs changed the economics of team ownership and the patterns of fan attendance. Now the talent pool has been watered down among 28 teams with the owners promising four more to come. Public acceptance of Triple-A level baseball as a substitute for the real thing has emboldened the owners to think that they can take the game down yet another notch without any consequences.

Attendance is up 24 percent, 9 percent not counting the Colorado and Florida expansion franchises. Six teams are averaging more than 40,000 per game. At the end of the regular season, two of these teams will have a home gate in excess of 4 million.Seldom have the pennant races been closer, especially in the American League. Four teams are within a game of the lead in the East, five within 2 1/2 games. In the West, six games separate the top five teams. Even the Oakland A's, who have begun to experiment with three-inning pitchers, have a chance: nine games out with 71 to play.

When the illustrious achievements of Ned Hanlon are measured under the microscope, it's difficult to comprehend why he has been passed over for election to the Baseball Hall of Fame, the highest honor the game bestows. This is not an indictment of omission but rather a regrettable statement of fact.Hanlon has an imposing record . . . the leader and architect of five pennant-winning teams in Baltimore and Brooklyn during a 19-year managing career; endorsement as the father of what evolved into the modern strategy; and an exemplary role as a civic leader in Baltimore.