CRYSTAL ON DECK FOR '98 OSCARCAST.

Byline: Rick Lyman The New York Times

Billy Crystal stood in the middle of center field and looked at the great curving grandstand of Yankee Stadium looming up and all around him, an embracing wall of empty blue seats. A slow smile spread across his face. ``Look at that throw to the plate,'' he said. ``Look how far that is.''

It was still several weeks before the opening game, set for April 10 against Oakland, and the stadium was undergoing its pre-season buffing. New paint was everywhere, the bathrooms were getting new tile, the dugouts were being updated, and a fresh crescent of bright green sod stretched between the foul poles, pumping out a fragrant cocoon of oxygen.

But Crystal's relationship with the team began when he was 8 and has followed him into stardom, so Yankee officials had agreed to let him wander around the near-empty stadium. He turned 50 on Saturday, and something about that birthday and the hard roundness of that number made him want to come back to the Bronx.

Crystal nodded when asked if it was turning out to be a difficult birthday.

``I feel great, I feel healthy, I really do,'' he said. ``Things are going good. But to tell you the truth, I could be happier about turning 50.''

Crystal began tossing around statistics with a friend and a Yankees official who were strolling across the outfield with him, a torrent of numbers and old games. There are no blank holes in his knowledge of the Yankees, Crystal said, going back to the time his father first brought him down Jerome Avenue. He has kept up with it, and it's no halfway thing.

``Oh no, this is insane,'' he said. ``I'm a little crazy about this. I only hope the GE College Bowl can come back so I can take `Yankees for $50.' I'd know the answer before they asked the question.''

A few years ago, he put a satellite dish up at his house in Los Angeles. ``All I really wanted was to get the Yankee games and the Knick games,'' he said. But after setting it up he discovered, to his horror, that neither was available in Southern California. So he called the Yankees, and they called the cable channel, and it rigged it up so that somehow his dish would get the games. The Yankees also gave him the number at the team's central control booth in New York.

``Every now and then, I'll be watching and it will go blank or something and I'll get on the phone. It rings a couple of times and the guy answers, `Yeah?' I say, `It's me, this is Billy,' and he'll go, `What, you're not getting it? Hold on.' He'll flip a switch and it comes back on. It's great.''

Gearing up for the Oscars

It was not easy for Crystal to take off the afternoon to shag imaginary grounders at Yankee Stadium.

He has a new movie coming out in April, ``My Giant,'' which he also produced. He plays a foundering talent agent who exploits and then befriends a Romanian giant played by Gheorghe Muresan, the 7-foot-7 center for the Washington Wizards. After a short break, filming will begin for ``Analyze This,'' a comedy in which he plays a psychiatrist forced to treat a Mafia don, played by Robert De Niro, who is having a nervous breakdown. The movie is to be directed by Harold Ramis and shot in New York.

But right now, most of his attention is focused on the Academy Awards ceremony on March 23, of which he is to be the host for the sixth time.

``They started working on me at the first commercial break last year,'' he said. ``They'd say, `Are you coming back next year?' It never let up. Then, once I say yes, it's `OK, here we go.' It's always in the back of your mind. You're always trying to write a `Titanic' joke.''

Last year, when he returned as host of the event after a three-year hiatus (he was host from 1990 to 1993), Crystal was greeted with a standing ovation from the Hollywood crowd. He is proud of the film that opened last year's ceremonies, in which he was digitally inserted into clips from nominated movies, and said his biggest concern has been to come up with something fresh for this year.

``This is my sixth year doing the show,'' he said. ``Johnny Carson only did it five. And Bob Hope, who did it for something like 17 years, always had this built-in character of his, the never-got-nominated thing. I'm always worried about coming up with something new and different.''

He and his writers have been cranking out the jokes for a while, but particularly since the announcement of the nominees in February gave him some firm targets to work with.

``What we do is we look at the schedule for the show,'' Crystal said. ``I'll have something like 23 or 25 appearances during the night. So we try to decide what are my best opportunities to score. And I need to have several jokes for each opportunity, so I can shift depending on how it goes and who wins. We write hundreds and hundreds of jokes, at least five for every one I eventually use.''

Crystal doesn't think there will be any Monica Lewinsky jokes. ``It's ugly to read about, it's ugly to think about, and it's too easy,'' he said.

He is eager to get more movie stars, even those who are not nominated, into the audience. ``I want to make it more of a party than a stiff show, to make it as informal as I can,'' he said.

That's not so easy.

``Everybody's tense,'' he said. ``It's really hard to score a laugh from that crowd. There are bright lights and cameras on them all the time. They're nervous anyway, and the last thing they want is a hand-held camera in their face.''

An emotional time machine

A short while before his walk through the stadium, Crystal had been driving along the Bronx side of the Harlem River when the car slid around a corner and the stadium came into view. He stopped in mid-sentence.

``Every time I come up this road and see that thing, I have to stop,'' he said. ``I still feel the same way I did when I was a little boy. The joy it gave me when I was playing with my friends, pretending to be a Yankee, or pretending with my brother that we were broadcasting the games.''

He got out of the car and walked into the stadium, smiling and waving at the groundskeepers and others hanging around the entrance.

``I just think of my father,'' he said. ``Every time I'm here, I think of my father. I think of the way he got us to love it without saying, `Love this.' ''

He went to a lot of the games with his father and then, when he was older, with his friends. Most of the boys in Long Beach, N.Y., were Dodgers fans, or maybe rooted for the Giants. ``But I couldn't understand how you couldn't be a Yankees fan,'' he said. ``They had Mickey Mantle.''

He played ball with the neighborhood kids, then shortstop and second base on his high school team. ``I would limp for no reason, just because Mantle limped around the bases,'' Crystal said.

Mantle was the heart of his loyalty to the team. ``It was Mickey that made you want to be a Yankees fan,'' he said. ``He was so cool. He looked like a movie star. If you liked James Dean or Elvis, then you liked Mickey.''

Later, when he became friends with Mantle, it was a delirious experience for him. ``I was appearing on the `Dinah Shore Show,' about 20 years after I got my program signed, and Mickey was a guest the same day, so I brought the program out with me, and he signed it again,'' Crystal said.

When Mantle died in 1995, the Yankees asked Crystal and sports announcer Bob Costas to write a tribute for his funeral. The two men spent a long night in a hotel room kicking ideas back and forth. ``It was a real moment, watching those guys from the '61 team carry that casket,'' he said. ``They were older, you know, a lot of them were sick. There was something about seeing that, it really got you.''

Cherishing a piece of history

Crystal walked through the gate and up a stairwell leading through the seats on the first-base side of the infield. After a few steps, he stopped and looked down at the fresh blue seat, tapping it with his fingers.

``One time, in 1974, when they were tearing down the old stadium, I happened to come by, and there were workmen out on the street selling pieces to people,'' he said. ``They were selling some of the old seats. I really wanted one. I wanted it bad. But the guy wouldn't take a check. It broke my heart.''

A decade later, when he was being honored by the Anti-Defamation League at a New York banquet, the master of ceremonies of the event, who had heard this story, came out on stage and unveiled an actual seat from the old stadium, which he presented to Crystal.

``I was stunned, absolutely flabbergasted,'' he said. ``And it was seat No. 7, too. It was Mickey's number.''

That evening, he went back to his hotel in Manhattan, the seat under his arm, and the concierge told him that Mantle was in the bar and wanted him to come in and say hello. So he went in there and told Mantle about the seat. The ex-slugger shook his head. ``I put asses in those seats, and I don't even have one,'' Mantle said. Crystal asked him if he would sign the seat, which was out with the concierge, and Mantle promised he would.

Later, Crystal picked up the seat and read what Mantle had written on it:

``I wish you were still sitting here,'' it said, ``and that I was still playing.''

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) One of Billy Crystal's heroes remains the late Yankee great Mickey Mantle. ``It was Mickey that made you want to be a Yankees fan,'' says the comedian who makes frequent pilgrimages to Yankee Stadium.

(2) Crystal and his writers prepare hundreds of jokes for Oscar night, writing five for every one he eventually uses during the ceremony.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times