NL'S 'SMALL BALL' SHOULD BE MINIMIZED.

Byline: TONY JACKSON 

Let me preface this by saying I am, to the core, a National League guy, and I have little use for the alternative. It is for all the usual reasons. I hate the designated hitter. I hate the Yankees. I hate regular-season games that last four hours. I hate beer-league softball and games that end in scores like 17-15.

Having said all that, I am about to take my favorite circuit to task. After a quarter of a century as a diehard baseball fan and after almost a decade of chronicling the sport on a daily basis, I have had it up to here with National League ``small ball.''

Don't get me wrong, it had its day. It's just that that day was so very long ago.

Sitting in the press box - or rather, the sweatbox - at St. Louis' Busch Stadium this weekend, I found myself harkening back to 1982, the year of the Cardinals' last world championship. I remembered the way that club was constructed, how athletic those players were, how electrifying their brand of baseball was.

Whitey Herzog, the manager, was also the general manager. He built the team around its ballpark, which at the time had an astroturf playing surface that was especially spongy and outfield dimensions Paul Bunyan would have been hard-pressed to reach.

The Cardinals were the perfect team for a park like that, with incredible speed at every position, a collective willingness to run on any count and in any situation. They had only one power hitter, right fielder George Hendrick, among all those rabbits.

To watch them was, in a word, a blast. It was small ball at its best, with hitters routinely slashing balls into the gaps and simply running as far as they could while opposing outfielders waited for the ball to stop bouncing high above their heads.

Those Cardinals also were adept at scratching out a run at a time, usually with someone like Lonnie Smith, Ozzie Smith, Willie McGee or Tom Herr singling or drawing a walk to begin an inning, stealing second, taking third on a well-placed bunt or bouncer to the right side of the infield and scoring on a sacrifice fly.

Twenty-one years later, small ball has become something else entirely. And, in my humble opinion, it has become entirely obsolete. Where it once was about manufacturing runs, it seems now to be a self-destructive effort to waste as many outs as possible.

Take, for instance, the Dodgers' 5-4 loss to Atlanta on Aug. 19. Trailing 5-3 in the bottom of the seventh, the Dodgers got a leadoff bunt single by David Ross and a pinch-hit single by Olmedo Saenz. It put runners on first and second with none out and the top of the lineup coming up. So what did hot-hitting leadoff man Cesar Izturis do? Naturally, he tried to bunt the runners over.

Izturis failed, bunting into a force at third. But even if he succeeded in sacrificing, my contention is that the play is overrated. The Dodgers would have had runners on second and third with one out, meaning a sacrifice fly could have pulled them within a run. But in order to tie, someone still would have had to hit safely to bring home the second run.

Moreover, why take the bat out of the speedy Izturis' hands at a time when he had an eight-game hitting streak, especially with the heart of the order coming up behind him? Why waste an out trying to score two runs when you might have a chance to score several?

Another factor is the difference in National League ballparks. During the small-ball heyday, most of them were large, multipurpose venues with distant, hard-to-reach fences. Now, most of them are newer and smaller, in some cases bandboxes. When balls leave the park as routinely as they do in Houston or Philadelphia, why would a manager ever want to reduce his allotment of 27 outs by three or four a game in deference to some notion of the ``right way to play the game?''

I will concede that if the pitcher's spot comes up with a man on first, a man on second or men on first and second and less than two outs, bunting is always the best option. I'm also partial to the suicide squeeze, an especially exciting play that relies on the element of surprise. But I would rather drive in a runner from first with a double than move him to second with a sacrifice.