START BASEBALL SEASON AT DODGERS' HUGE WEB SITE.

Byline: Tim Grobaty Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

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With baseball season now under way, we reported dutifully to the Official Los Angeles Dodgers Web site (http://www.dodgers.com), which comes so loaded with Dodger dope that we're almost sick of the season already.

This behemoth has pages devoted to ticket info, a kids' section, a 3-D tour of Dodger Stadium, live game updates (when a live game is being played, that is), players' bios and stats, a '97 schedule, broadcast information, merchandise, separate sections on Hideo Nomo and Chan Ho Park and, most breathtaking and hard-disk-consuming of all, a sprawling multimedia gallery with photos and audio and visual clips for downloading.

Among the highlights of the more than 50 videos you can view are several given over to Jackie Robinson: Jackie stealing home in the '55 World Series, Jackie's last game in Brooklyn, Jackie being talked about by Branch Rickey. Plus, clips of our beloved Sandy Koufax wrapping up his perfect game, Tommy Lasorda celebrating the Series win in '88 and Nomo finishing his no-hitter last season. Tragically, there's no vid of Kirk Gibson's shot-heard-round-the-universe, though it is available at this site on audio.

As exhausting as the visit to the Dodger yard was, it was a breeze compared to the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel Web site (http://www.hardrock.com/hotel). We're growing weary of all these overly cluttered sites with separate frames given over to varying menus. The Hard Rock site, though, does have a lot of features, including a collection of virtual postcards, a history of the joint, a schedule of hard-rockers' performances, merchandise, chat rooms and a section where a sleazy cat named Winnin' Willie offers gaming tips and lessons.

Both the Dodgers and the Hard Rockers could learn some Web-design lessons from the design of the new New York Times Book Review Web site (http://www.nytimes.com/books), which skyrockets to the No. 1 spot in our nonexistent Best Sites on the Web list.

Each week, the Times, the undisputed best when it comes to book news and reviews, delivers a spate of new reviews and news, as well as Real Audio segments. When we visited, we could hear, among other things, Don DeLillo reading from his ``Libra'' and an interview with Stephen King.

Further, you can browse through the Book Review's past issues back to 1980 and access more than 50,000 titles.

The site also includes book news, several book discussion areas and the latest best-seller lists.

Another site where, if you had the mind to, you could spend weeks rummaging around is the National Security Archive (http://www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive), a repository of declassified documents compiled and maintained at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

The archive is a treasure trove for people who want to know what the government is up to - or at least what they were up to back when these documents were still top secret.