TV BASEBALL: THE UNKIND AND UNCUT

The luster fades.

Honest-talking Mickey Mantle is a salesman these days, making the talk-show rounds to sell his moderately interesting biography, “The Mick.” The former New York Yankee great’s appearances on TV help erode his own aura. Though earnest and affable, the Mick is like most superstar athletes, more a giant on the field than off.

TV is not kind to legends.

It was different in earlier days, when TV wasn’t there to deflate swollen myths and stop sports idols and legends from growing and growing and growing like the fish that got away.

Mantle’s own history is proof of that. Mickey’s father named him after the great catcher Mickey Cochrane. As a kid growing up in Oklahoma farm country, his idol was the great Stan Musial. And as a young Yankee in 1950, Mickey “couldn’t even mumble hello” when he first met the great Joe DiMaggio.

“He had this aura,” says Mickey in his book through writer Herb Gluck. “It was as if you needed an appointment just to approach him. Then it was a question of getting up enough courage to speak. Remember, I had been reading about this guy for a long time.”

When Mantle was a kid following DiMaggio’s career, there was no network TV game of the week, no instant replays in embarrassing slo mo to capture the graceful DiMaggio occasionally tripping in the field instead of gliding.

There was no TV camera around to show the speedless Cochrane lumbering on the basepaths, no camera to record Musial whiffing at the plate or Ty Cobb being thrown out trying to steal second base.

It’s harder to make a case for immortality in the high-tech era. The gaudy stats of the Atlanta Braves’ Dale Murphy are balanced by the sight of him looking like a bum on TV during a recent batting slump. Reggie Jackson has hit a ton of home runs. But there also were TV cameras galore to catch him striking out with the bases loaded or butchering a ball in right field.

Those are the kind of negative stats that didn’t appear on the baseball cards Mantle and other awed kids collected while dreaming of starring in the majors.

The same TV camera that builds myths around politicians also humanizes and demystifies great athletes by showing them on the screen unvarnished and unedited. In this era of rampant media, TV has become our living history.

And a conveyor of mixed messages.

That point is made, perhaps unintentionally, in “A Comedy Salute to Baseball,” an hour special NBC is airing Monday (8 p.m. on Channels 4 and 39), the night before baseball’s scheduled annual All-Star game.

It’s an affectionate, uneven hour whose highest spots are provided by host Billy Crystal, who reprises his side-splitting “Fernando’s Hideaway” character from “Saturday Night Live” in a conversation with New York Yankees principal owner George (Fernando calls him Jorge) Steinbrenner.

Fernando: You look mahvelous, darling.

Crystal also appears as a poignant Yankee clubhouse attendant, a veteran who laments the long-term guaranteed fat salaries of today’s players: “You know what I’d do to motivate them? I’d announce their salaries when they come up to bat. That’s what I’d do.”

Earlier on the program, we see that famous clip of the dying Lou Gehrig telling a Yankee Stadium throng that he considers himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” And there is Reggie Jackson almost simultaneously defining baseball as Gehrig “expressing for all time how each of us feels when we put on the uniform and go to work.”

Oh, sure. As Jackson speaks, baseball joins other sports in being beset with drug problems, journeyman bench-warmers make more money than neurosurgeons and the possibility of a players’ strike is casting a cloud over Tuesday’s All-Star game.

What would Gehrig say to all this?

Lou the legend would be horrified. But who knows about the real Lou, the one that Gary Cooper didn’t play in “Pride of the Yankees”?

If Gehrig were playing today, perhaps he’d be making Lite Beer commercials or modeling underwear like Jim Palmer as part of TV’s continuous instant replay of famous jocks.

You wonder if that’s what awaits Boris Becker, the 17-year-old Wunderkind work-in-progress whose winning of Wimbledon has made him the sports industry’s current hottest ticket. Does he now become a Wunderkind commercial property a la Mary Lou Retton, who has evolved into less a heroine than a huckster for Wheaties?

Some of the sports and advertising world’s biggest figures carry the heaviest TV baggage.

When I see Billy Martin in beer commercials, I also see the same man whose emotional instability has been captured so vividly on sportscasts.

When I see John McEnroe selling razor blades or tennis shoes, I also see the same infant on TV throwing tantrums and being abusive on the tennis court.

When I see Jimmy Connors as a spokesman for an investment firm, I also see the boor whose obscene gestures on the court were recorded on TV.

Some legends. Not so mahvelous, darling.