It has been so long since the nation has been grateful to its pastime that some people are already pressing this past season into the record books as a gift.
They are falling over themselves thanking Mark McGwire for acting like a boys' book sports hero and Sammy Sosa for acting like a cowboy hero's sidekick and even George Steinbrenner for acting civil. There has been a contagion of niceness; until recently, most of the fans who risked the disabled list to retrieve a home run ball in the stands asked nothing more in return for their prize than a few of the millionaires' used shirts and bats.
I'm grateful, too. Just when we needed it most, twisted with guilt and self-loathing for wallowing in a sad sex opera, along came baseball opera, outdoors and clean, big boys swinging big bats in public. There was a show somewhere in the country almost every single day and night, and there were even two conflicting operatic cycles to follow.
There was the Three Tenor Cycle in which McGwire, Sosa and Ken Griffey Jr. set out to prove that three great performers belting out crowd-pleasing hits were more compelling than the magnificent, extravagant game itself, much as Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras have been marketed to overshadow the repertory. (Like Carreras, Griffey slipped out of the mainstream consciousness).
Then there was the Championship Ring Cycle. Especially in New York, which means the main stage, the Yankees were held up as the culmination of baseball evolution. Without a single overwhelming diva, they set records for victories and for models of winning ensemble performance. This wasn't just a couple of glass-shattering leads pointing up the weakness of the chorus and the script; this was the game as it was supposed to be played. This was Wagner, where you go to lose yourself in the music of the spheres, where the stories are dark and mythic; Darryl Strawberry's diagnosis of colon cancer was yet another chapter in what has become his modern hero's journey along a path of promise, misfortune, self-destruction, redemption and testing. Siegfried!
We were so needy of distraction this season, we were able to accept both operatic cycles although they seemed to contradict each other, especially when McGwire could do little for the Cardinals and Sosa's Cubs just squeaked into the post-season. That there was room for both cycles proved that of our so-called major league sports only baseball (coincidentally, opera is making its own comeback in America) could have captured our minds in a crisis.
Basketball is blowing it again. It's jazz, always wonderful, always in trouble. In the '70s after the crossover success of Bill Bradley and the Knicks, it was touted as the next pastime. But it smoked and snorted its future away. It came back again in the '90s, but too much depended on the relentless marketing of Michael Jordan, who is not so interesting anymore.
We've seen all his public moves. His heir, the hip-hop prince Allen Iverson, may not be quite so easy to sell, especially in boardrooms. But then, there's nothing to sell right now; preseason games have been canceled and a regular-season start on the scheduled Nov. 3 seems unlikely as millionaires work out their contractual disputes. Since they were merchandised as entertainers, there is no urgency to sympathize with them.
In fact, my only concern is that Bradley may have lost his exquisite timing and ability to move without the ball. His new book, ''Values of the Game,'' a kind of handbook of virtue based on what he learned while dribbling in short pants, seemed designed as a white paper for his presidential run. With this Bill in the White House we might not need baseball, at least not for moral sustenance.
The football season got under way on time, but because of baseball only the rabid noticed. Football seems to have settled into its niche as socially acceptable pornography, big boys without big bats slamming into each other, and later into their wives and girlfriends. Rock-and-roll in all its forms, including punk and rap.
When the secret files of the NFL are released, we will find out that the scouting combines were always looking for pathology as high draft indicators. Exposed, the NFL will defend itself by saying it wanted to keep those crazies on the field and out of mainstream life.
Forget about hockey, as have, alas, most Americans. Marching band music. Which leaves boxing with the power to distract us, the compelling urgency of a single voice in the night, Ella, Bob Dylan, Sinatra. Joe Louis, Ali, Mike Tyson. We may yet need Mike again, canny, crazy Mike, the most disturbed, passionate, interesting, exploited and dangerous voice on the sporting stage. He must be licensed to fight again. If there are impeachment proceedings, we can't be sure that baseball will be in season.
Robert Lipsyte's column is syndicated by The New York Times.
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