ONLY AN EINSTEIN CAN SOLVE THIS MESS.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

SAN FRANCISCO - Baseball teams bolt all sorts of titles to the doors of their general managers' offices. Some guys are plain old GMs and a few are highfalutin' presidents and CEOs. In between are sundry VPs, executive VPs and senior VPs.

But only one, simple word will be necessary for the man the Dodgers need to replace Kevin Malone. ``Genius'' will do just fine.

Dodgers boss Bob Daly can talk all he wants - as he did in discussing Malone's forced resignation Thursday - about redefining the GM's role in this ever-changing game. The club is in a terrible pickle, shorthanded on the field, overdrawn at the salary bank and locked into bad deals. It's going to take nothing more complicated than 200-IQ brilliance to extricate it.

Maybe someone out there knows the answer, the magic formula, the third way. And maybe he wants the job.

It'll have to be someone with a track record of success behind a GM's desk, the guts to tell Daly how bad things are and the credibility to keep fans optimistic through what might be a bitter retrenchment. A tall order, all this.

I liked what Dave Wallace, the Dodgers executive and ex-pitching coach named interim GM, said when he described the club as ``what was at one time a great organization.'' Asked about his brutal choice of words, Wallace didn't back down, speaking of a failed ``maintenance process''

But Wallace lacks the resume to be the Dodgers' GM. He doesn't want to do it, in any case.

Whoever is hired for the long term will have to be just as blunt.

Say what you want about the way Daly savaged Malone in a teleconference with reporters Thursday. Five days after he challenged a heckler to a fight in San Diego, the Dodgers asked Malone to step outside. Then they closed the door behind him. Then they badmouthed him.

``He would sometimes just walk into a minefield,'' Daly said in describing ``the accumulation of things'' that made Malone ``a distraction.''

But understand that Daly also gave Malone a break by describing a way- too-rosy picture of the roster he leaves behind.

``We have something really good going this year, I truly believe,'' Daly said a few hours before the Dodgers took on the San Francisco Giants with a lineup featuring three sub-.200 hitters.

Daly speaks with the optimistic emotion of a lifelong fan, which he is. His assessment has to sound ridiculous to anybody who follows the team.

The next Dodgers GM must be somebody with the heft to push Daly off the stage and act as the face, voice and identity of the front office. The way Al Campanis did (there's a reason he was simply ``The Chief''), back when a Dodgers owner hired a leader and got out of the way.

Malone didn't have that heft to begin with. The lightweight became lighter as his litany of laughable behavior and remarks grew, and as the team kept running in place on the field, yet to match the 88 wins of Fred Claire's last full season in 1997. By the time he went jaw to jaw with the fan last weekend, the New Sheriff had become Barney Fife nervously fishing that bullet out of his shirt pocket.

The GM candidates should be lining up to fill shoes that small. Daly seems certain they will.

``I would think people would love to be the GM of the Los Angeles Dodgers,'' Daly said.

The truth of the matter - to use Daly's oft-repeated phrase - is that although a prospective GM's eyes might light up at the Dodgers' $100 million payroll, he'll soon realize that money is already spent and room for serious maneuvering could be years away.

The biggest test yet of Daly's baseball acumen will be his ability to recruit the Dodgers' next Chief. John Hart, responsible for baseball's most successful reclamation project, is retiring from the Cleveland Indians at season's end, and if he wants the job, this could be a quick and clean hiring process.

After that, the test for Daly would be his willingness to give full control to the new Chief, even if it means jettisoning a big-contract star for wiggle room or replacing the well-liked manager Jim Tracy with a soulmate of the GM.

If the next man in Malone's office doesn't deserve and receive that respect, the title won't mean anything.