YANKEES SWEEP! IS THIS TEAM THE BEST EVER?

Byline: KAREN CROUSE

The world is like baseball's strike zone and Calista Flockhart's waistline: It continues to shrink before our eyes.

Thanks to the wonders of technology, a baseball belted out of a park in Southern California turns people's heads around the globe. The sheer exposure afforded today's players at once enlarges their celebrity and reduces their margin of error. It magnifies what the New York Yankees have accomplished this year to the point where this much is as obvious as the nose on manager Joe Torre's face:

These Yankees are the pride of any season.

From Antarctica to Zaire, more than 200 countries watched Wednesday as the Yankees completed a four-game sweep of the San Diego Padres in the 94th World Series.

Global strife isn't covered by the number of correspondents who descended upon Qualcomm Stadium for the climax of this Fall Classic. There were 1,000 credentialed reporters scrutinizing and second-guessing every pitch and every swing. There were 19 Fox Network television cameras (not counting the catcher cam) recording every facial tic, registering every emotion.

During the revelation that was the Yankees' glorious 11-2 postseason, we saw right fielder Paul O'Neill throw his batting helmet against a dugout wall and center fielder Bernie Williams slip out a side door to avoid our prying questions. We heard people ask pitcher David Wells about his night life and shortstop Derek Jeter about his love life.

The 1927 Yankees - the team against which all others are measured - won 110 regular-season games and finished with a .714 winning percentage. En route to sweeping Pittsburgh in four games in the World Series, those Bronx Bombers didn't have to worry about being picked apart on sports talk radio by the likes of Benny from Brooklyn or Harvey from Harlem.

In 1927, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Earle Combs were the fastball killers on Murderers' Row, but they weren't pursued like fugitives by television reporters from ESPN, Fox, Comedy Central and MTV.

Throughout the postseason, Torre talked about the need for players ``to sort of hide out'' to maintain their focus. Then he'd return to a clubhouse that was more crowded than a New York subway train at rush hour.

In Ruth's day, players could hide behind a tumbler in a bar without worrying about being exposed by reporters. Nowadays, it's all the players can do to cover themselves with a towel before their privacy is invaded.

Somehow, the 1998 Yankees survived the scrutiny and thrived.

Don't ask Torre how they did it. He hasn't a clue. ``Even when we were tense, we played well,'' he said. ``That's unusual in my experience. That was a revelation to me, that guys aren't loose and yet they still manage to win.''

His Yankees won 114 regular-season games and matched the overall winning percentage of the 1927 Yankees in a season that is now eight games longer. Those Yankees had Ruth and Gehrig and Combs and shortstop Mark Koenig, whose .500 batting average in the World Series led all the hitters in pinstripes.

This year's Yankees had Williams, Tino Martinez and, until he was diagnosed with colon cancer, Darryl Strawberry, but also Scott Brosius who batted .538 in the first three games of the Series.

The unsung heroes of the 1927 Yankees were their starting pitchers: Waite Hoyte, George Pipgras, Herb Pennock and Wilcy Moore. So it was with the 1998 Yankees' rotation of Wells, Orlando Hernandez, David Cone and Andy Pettitte.

Are Torre's Yankees better than Miller Huggins' men of 1927?

``Well, you hear about those guys a lot,'' Torre said.

Torre wears the pinstripes too well to tread over the legacy of any Yankee team.

But all things being equal, the nod has to go to the 1998 team because of the one significant thing that distinguishes the two. The 1927 Yankees didn't have an African-American on their roster. Or a Latin American. The major-league teams in those days excluded some wonderfully talented players from the game's fraternity and even the greatest teams of those days were poorer for it.

This year's squad is as diverse as the boroughs surrounding Yankee Stadium. Williams, who won the American League batting crown, is from Puerto Rico. The winning pitcher in Game 2, Hernandez, is a Cuban who sailed to freedom on a leaky boat last December. There also are players on the roster from Japan, Australia, Panama and Venezuela.

The first four batters from the 1927 team are immortalized in the Hall of Fame. The ballots are out on Chuck Knoblauch, Derek Jeter, O'Neill and Williams, but this much Torre knows for certain:

``It's a terrific ballclub when it comes to self-motivation and determination, like no other club I've ever been around,'' said Torre, who has managed 17 seasons for four different organizations. ``These players have an inner security about them. They know they're good but they don't really care about telling people how good they are.''

In that respect, the 1998 Yankees are very much a reflection of their manager. Torre was a league MVP in 1971 and a part-time player a couple of years after that. So he can relate to the stars on his team but also has an empathetic touch with the journeyman players.

All year Torre had people telling him how good his Yankees were. Now he should feel free to agree. They're quite simply the best.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

PHOTO (1 -- color) Yankees pitcher Mariano Rivera gets a hug from catcher Joe Girardi after the final out.

G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times

(2) Babe Ruth's 1927 Yanks were good. This year's Yanks may be better.