BY STAR SLUGGER'S STAT, PUT AN ASTERISK.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

Let's hear it for the poor, misunderstood asterisk. Isn't he an adorable little bug, if you look again?

After Roger Maris hit 61 home runs to go one better than Babe Ruth, an asterisk was attached to that entry in the record book, a reminder that Maris' 1961 season was eight games longer than Ruth's 1927 season.

The annotation was ridiculed as the work of a nostalgic baseball establishment, old men who couldn't stand to see the Babe's legend diminished. Why, commissioner Ford Frick, who ordered the punctuation, had been a Ruth biographer!

Maris took on the aura of a martyr, badgered during his record pursuit, wrongly denied by the Hall of Fame, dying too young of cancer. The asterisk became as popular as a virus.

But maybe it's time to give that asterisk another chance at love.

Maybe the men who tried to edit history weren't really such dingbats. Maybe they weren't looking backward but forward.

Maybe they envisioned a day when the most captivating record of them all would come under siege again and the comparisons would not be Ruth vs. Maris but Maris vs. Mark McGwire, Maris vs. Ken Griffey Jr. and Maris vs. Sammy Sosa. Maybe they envisioned a day when people would talk about home run feats without mentioning the man who practically invented the deed.

Maybe they envisioned today, when newspapers run ``Maris Watch'' boxes updating the record chasers and the name Ruth is nowhere to be found.

Nothing against Maris. The fact his record has stood for 37 years, three longer than Ruth's, says it is legitimate. But talking about home run history without Ruth is like talking about the history of Fords without Henry Ford.

The reason given for the asterisk - the different season lengths - was contrived. But the motive was pure.

Look: Hitting 60 home runs in 1927 was so much more of an achievement than hitting 61 in '61 - and whatever McGwire, Griffey and Sosa wind up with in '98 - that it makes all other analysis pointless.

In '27, the next-best slugger, Ruth's Yankees teammate Lou Gehrig, had 47 homers, and the third-best, the National League's Hack Wilson and Cy Williams, had 30. The average major-league team hit 58. No other American League team hit more than 56.

In '61, Mickey Mantle hit 54, three men hit 46, and the average team was up to 152 homers. Maris would have had to hit about 100 homers to stand out as Ruth did.

And in '98, as of the All-Star break, McGwire was on pace to hit 70, but Griffey (64) and Sosa (61) were close behind and Greg Vaughn (55) and Andres Galarraga (51) made it obvious how much easier it is to hit homers these days. Question: How many homers would McGwire have to hit to match Ruth's accomplishment? (Answer below.)

This will be a big summer for the Babe. Tuesday at 4:30 p.m., an ESPN documentary, ``Babe Ruth's Larger Than Life Legacy,'' will make its debut. On Aug. 16, the 50th anniversary of Ruth's death, HBO will show a biography by the makers of the ``When It Was a Game'' retrospectives.

The ESPN production purports not to be a biography, concentrating on less-explored aspects of his life as well as his lasting impact.

``In 1920, when Ruth came to New York, that's basically the beginning of sports as we know it,'' said producer Chris Martens (who, like Frick, wrote a Ruth biography, collaborating with Ruth's daughter, Dorothy Ruth Pirone, on ``My Dad, the Babe'').

ESPN looks at Ruth's unfulfilled ambition to manage the Yankees after his retirement as a player. His daughter alleged that he was blackballed by baseball owners because of the way he had driven up salaries. Martens points out that Ruth was the only one of the first seven Hall of Famers who never managed.

In other words: Ruth preceded Maris on the roster of the underappreciated.

Much has been written about the differences in Ruth's and McGwire's playing conditions. Ruth had the advantages of softer travel, a stronger lineup around him, and never facing African-American and Latin American pitchers. McGwire has year-round conditioning, a livelier baseball and pitching diluted by expansion.

All of which adds up to nothing. No matter how different the conditions might have been in '27, the fact is that they were the same for Ruth as for other major-league batters then, and he made them look like children.

Which leads to the answer to our question: How many homers would McGwire have to hit, in this homer-happy season, to dominate the way Ruth did? About 150.

Anything less and it's time Maris' asterisk had a mate.