STEINBRENNER'S MOVES COOL THE FEVER OF 2002.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

Major-league teams begin spring training in Florida and Arizona this week, and here's one baseball fan who wonders whether they might be persuaded to put it off a while longer.

Hey, guys, what's your hurry?

Couldn't you let us enjoy 2002 for a few more weeks before we face 2003? Couldn't we bask in that Angels-Giants World Series for another month or two before everybody starts the process of getting stomped on by the Yankees? Wouldn't it be nice if this winter of content went on and on and the sport's accountants never commenced their annual hand-wringing over dollar signs?

I know baseball fans are supposed to spend the winter counting the days until spring training. I've been hoping winter would never end.

As pitchers and catchers report to camp, they are followed onto the practice diamonds by a surly comeback player called reality.

Last year was a fantasy that is unlikely to be repeated soon. Owners and players achieved peace in their time. The moribund franchise in Montreal had a winning season, the small-market teams in Minnesota and Oakland made October, and Anaheim (with the 15th-highest payroll) beat San Francisco (10th) in a back-and-forth World Series. Along the way, the Angels peppered the Yankees into defeat in the first round of the playoffs, maintaining the illusion that this is an equal-opportunity game.

Now it seems that all the strike-averting settlement and the lovable Angels accomplished in the long run was to wake a sleeping giant named George Steinbrenner.

Feeling persecuted by the owners-players contract's plan to redistribute wealth from teams like the Yankees to teams like the Royals, embarrassed by the Yankees' comprehensive loss to the Angels, Steinbrenner set out to bury the rest of baseball in cash.

By the time his latest spending spree was over - assuming it's over - Steinbrenner had signed left fielder Hideki Matsui out of Japan and right-hander Jose Contreras out of Cuba, lined up seven starting pitchers to compete for five jobs and pushed the Yankees' player payroll to $164 million.

That's $24 million more than the Yankees were paying for players a year ago, $45 million more than anybody else is paying now and $47 million over the threshold at which teams must begin paying a 17.5-percent ``luxury tax.''

As if all of that didn't make his point that he expects to win, to mark the 30th anniversary of his ownership of the Yankees, Steinbrenner gave an interview in which he put the coaching staff on notice that it wasn't working hard enough and questioned man-about-Manhattan Derek Jeter's commitment to his craft.

This is going to get ugly if the Yankees live up to the boss' expectations and uglier if they don't.

What's he going to do, fire Joe Torre?

Well, sure.

The warmest winter in recent baseball history is officially over.

March 31, opening day for most teams, will be the publication date for ``May the Best Team Win,'' the latest definitive book on baseball economics by Smith College professor Andrew Zimbalist. The book argues that the impact of last summer's owners-players compromise agreement will be ``modest.''

``Over the agreement's four-year period, close to $1 billion will be shifted from the top to the bottom teams. It will be surprising if this does not level performance outcomes somewhat, mostly by blunting the top rather than lifting the bottom,'' Zimbalist writes of the revenue-sharing plan.

``The success of (down-market teams in 2002) notwithstanding, the correlation between payrolls and on-field success has been too strong to ignore. Although the new labor agreement will contribute mildly to rectifying imbalance, the financial trajectory of the industry is likely to contribute even more.''

It is ``difficult to imagine,'' Zimbalist writes, that the major leagues' economic tensions will ``disappear'' by the time the owners-players contract expires in 2007.

In other words, it might seem as though a lot has changed in baseball in the past year. But Expos winning seasons, A's vs. Twins playoff series and Angels-Giants World Series are likely to continue to be long shots, pleasant surprises, one-year wonders.

Couldn't we keep living that one year a while longer?