IT'S GOOD, SOUND FUNDAMENTAL NL BASEBALL, FOLKS.

Byline: KAREN CROUSE

Admit it, the National League set you up beautifully. It has been Trevor Hoffman-esque, really.

All season long the N.L. mesmerized you with long balls, 136 of them by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa alone. It came at you with the hard heat, knowing you wouldn't be able to resist it.

Now, after you've dug in, your interest piqued, the NL is challenging you with off-speed pitches that are the game's bread and butter.

The NL Championship Series between the Atlanta Braves and the San Diego Padres has been about solid strategies, sound fundamentals and stellar pitching and if that's throwing home-run fixated fans for a curve, well, they simply need to do what the Atlanta hitters seemingly cannot: adjust.

The Padres' pitching staff has left the Braves befuddled, battered and on the brink of elimination. Saturday, it was Sterling Hitchcock who started the Braves off on the wrong foot, holding his own against Atlanta ace Greg Maddux for five-plus innings and outhitting, among others, the Braves' Ryan Klesko.

Hitchcock handed the bullpen a 2-1 lead, having started the Padres' two-run rally in the fifth by singling off Maddux. Donne Wall, Dan Miceli, Randy Myers and Hoffman, the latter of whom struck out three of the five batters he faced, stretched it into a 4-1 win that gave the Padres a 3-0 lead in the best-of-seven series. Joey Hamilton will oppose Denny Neagle tonight as San Diego tries to clinch its first World Series appearance since 1984.

A possible sweep sounds so . . . lopsided. Ludicrously so, in this case. The Padres have outscored the Braves 10-3 in the three games but none of the wins have come easily. Game 1 was an extra-innings affair, Game 2 was scoreless through five and Game 3 looked like an Atlanta blowout-in-the-making on several occasions.

The Braves sent a hitter to the plate with the bases loaded five times, including twice in the sixth when the Padres were protecting a one-run lead.

The suspense was enough to make Padres rightfielder Tony Gwynn's heart leap into his throat, but on the mound, the only things fluttering were Wall's off-speed pitches.

He set up pinch-hitter Michael Tucker with four straight fastballs, then struck him out with a changeup that made the swinging Tucker look silly. He did the same thing with the next batter, Greg Colbrunn, whetting his appetite with a diet of fastballs then fooling him badly on a 2-2 curve.

When Colbrunn failed to make contact, the Qualcomm Stadium crowd of 62,779 raised a roar the likes of which Gwynn had never heard in his 38 years, the last 17 of which have been spent as a Padre. If the crowd gets any louder today, the sound waves will be lapping Eureka.

``I've never heard it louder,'' said Gwynn, who never has been prouder of the Padres' pitchers.

Relief pitching may have pulled the Padres out of an 0-2 deficit in their NLCS against Chicago and into the lair of the Tigers in 1984 but it's nothing compared to the contribution being made by this year's brothers in arms. Take starters Kevin Brown and Hitchcock. They have held the Braves to six hits in the past two games and collected three hits themselves, which is as much offense as Klesko, Andres Galarraga and Chipper Jones combined have mustered in the series.

Hitchcock's hit off Maddux - he jumped on the first pitch, a changeup, and slapped it into the leftfield gap - was huge, coming as it did with the Padres trailing 1-0 and the crowd as quiet as it was all afternoon. Hitchcock advanced to second on Quilvio Veras' ground-out and was doubled home by Steve Finley who himself crossed the plate on Ken Caminiti's two-out single.

``Textbook strategy,'' is what Gwynn, the consummate student of hitting, called Hitchcock's final at-bat.

``He stayed back on a change and blocked it out,'' Gwynn said. ``Hitch goes up there and does what I've been trying to do for two weeks and he does it perfectly. That's the way it's gone for us in the postseason. Everyone is contributing, someone different every night.''

Sometimes it's someone you'd never suspect. Acquired from Colorado in August, John Vander Wall was pressed into service at left field Saturday because of a strained quadricep that kept slugger Greg Vaughn out of the lineup a second straight game.

All Vander Wall did was make the defensive play of the game. In the third inning, after the Braves had taken a 1-0 lead on a single by Walt Weiss that scored Tony Graffanino, Vander Wall scooped up a Chipper Jones single to deep left and threw a strike to gun down Weiss at the plate and end the inning.

You see an outfielder throw out his first runner at home in six years in a game of this magnitude. You watch a Braves regular, Galarraga, commit his third error of the series and collect his first hit in a game of this magnitude. And you wonder if the series, however inconceivable it seems on the surface, isn't unfolding precisely as it should.