Going, Going, Not Quite Gone

By RICHARD CORLISS

Paul O'Neill had an off week at the ballpark. In just eight games, the New York Yankee outfielder's batting average dropped 43 points -- all the way down to .429 after Saturday's game. Well, it's a hard life but a hopeful one: if O'Neill soldiers on and maintains his .429 until the season's end, he will prove himself the most proficient batter of the 20th century.

That probably won't happen. O'Neill, a lifetime .268 hitter, will glide earthward and be hitting an imposing but not epochal .310 or so in October. But this spring, baseball has been bustin' out all over. Home runs have increased 26% over last year; runs batted in are up 11%. And a cluster of young stars threatens to smash offensive records set when George Burns was still in Little League. Seattle's Ken Griffey Jr. is on a pace to hit 65-plus homers. So is Frank Thomas, the Chicago White Sox's baby-faced behemoth. Thomas scored 59 runs by June 1, a record, and Toronto's Joe Carter set an April standard for rbi's. Even pencil-necked pipsqueaks are crushing the ball.

Admirers of the sport are happy that the summer game can actually spark excitement in a month when the winter games, basketball and hockey, are grabbing play-off headlines. Meanwhile, baseball solons ponder the bulging stats for the meaning of it all. A few notions:

IT'S THE BALL, STUPID. In a Costa Rican sweatshop, peons are making sure that the Rawlings baseballs they stitch together for the major leagues are wrapped tight, giving them extra flight potential and allowing the Mariners' Griffey to obliterate home-run records set by two imperialist Yankees, Babe Ruth (60 in 1927) and Roger Maris (61 in '61). Anyway, that's one conspiracy theory. Many pitchers and some batters believe the ball has been spiked, but Rawlings says its tests indicate no change. "The ball isn't juiced," says Griffey. But does he have a better idea of what's going on? No. "I'm not doing anything different from any other year," he says.

THE UMPS ARE BIASED. Pitchers carp about an elf-size strike zone and umpires who call close pitches in the batters' favor. "Borderline pitches make the difference," says White Sox starter Alex Fernandez, "and the umps don't give us those calls. They don't make guys swing the bat." Instead, hitters can wait for that fat one. Speaking of which ...

THE PITCHING STINKS. "It's just bad pitches," says White Sox coach Jackie Brown. "A bad pitch is one in the middle of the strike zone," where the ball looks like a watermelon and the bat feels like a magic wand. In '94, entire pitching staffs are lobbing large fruit: the Minnesota Twins and Oakland A's + have earned-run averages near 6.00 -- an excellent mark for figure skaters, a pathetic one for hurlers. Yet the good pitchers are as dominating as ever. And the best, Atlanta's Gregg Maddux, is allowing a miserly 1.34 earned runs per game.

BLAME WILLARD SCOTT. Everybody talks about the weather, but only rainmakers and baseball sluggers can profit from it. Could El Nino be the culprit, wafting dozens of puny pop-ups into the far bleachers? Jim Kaat thinks so. "This spring we've had the wind blowing out," observes the former 20-game winner, now an announcer for the White Sox. "Wrigley Field in Chicago, Fenway Park in Boston used to be pitchers' parks in April. This year they weren't."

THEY MUST BE GIANTS. "Guys today are bigger, stronger and faster," says Thomas (6 ft. 5 in., 257 lbs., minus 4% body fat). "You see guys hitting the weight room so much, you'd think they were football players. That's a big trend, and it works. Hitters are now strong enough to totally dominate baseball."

SOME GUYS ARE JUST LUCKY. "Sometimes luck can be as important as talent in this game," says O'Neill, referring to a rule that also governs the game of life. "A hitter has to realize that. Last week I was hitting the ball hard, and it was falling in. Last night I hit the ball hard, and they caught it." Wee Willie Keeler's dictum, enunciated nearly a century ago, still applies: Hit 'em where they ain't. And how does a ballplayer do that? With a great deal of skill and a little luck.

EVOLUTION OF THE SPECIES. "Guys are doing more preparation and conditioning," says Yanks hitting coach Rick Down. "Maybe they're just getting better."

Fans might sneer at that. Oh, they enjoy the onslaught -- catching those souvenir gopher balls, urging the home team on to a nine-run rally in the last at-bat. Yet they suspect that the quality of baseball is declining and that players make too much money at a kid's game.

O.K. -- granted. So why can't Michael Jordan hit the ball? The world's greatest athlete, alleviating his basketball burnout playing rightfield for the Birmingham Barons, is batting a measly .200 and hasn't hit a home run. Maybe the pitching is better in Alabama, or the ball is looser, or the umps meaner, or the wind blows in. Maybe Michael is just unlucky.

Or maybe hitting a baseball, even this season, is still a thing of beauty and a damn hard way to make a living. Soon the helium averages will drop, and good platesmen will stumble into month-long slumps. By October, O'Neill predicts, "the stats will be close to where they were last year." For now, though, we'll cheer the boys of spring. Will the sacred records fall? No one knows. But in June, everything is possible.

With reporting by Ellis E. Conklin/Seattle and David E. Thigpen/New York