THE WORLD SERIES: ATHLETICS vs DODGERS : IT’S NO ACT : Yeager, 39, Wishes He Was Still Playing Baseball, and Not Just in the Movies

Sure, it’s make-believe, it’s directors and lights and, yuck, makeup. The only makeup Steve Yeager ever wore before was dirt in the shape of a cleat.

Sure, it was only a movie. That’s what the former Dodger catcher kept telling himself last summer while being run over at home plate to the odd cheer of, “Good, now do it again.” That’s what he tried to convince himself of while making repeated throws to second base, good throws, enough to make actors Tom Berenger and Charlie Sheen stare.

“They would give me that look like ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, you can do this all night, can’t you?’ ” Yeager remembered. “And I got to thinking, yeah, I can still do this all night.”

The movie, a fictional account of the Cleveland Indians called “Major League” that is scheduled to be released in the summer of 1989, completed shooting a couple of weeks ago. But that last thought has stuck.

And on the eve of the first World Series in Los Angeles since he was a co-most valuable player of the event in 1981, Yeager has something he wants to get off his chest.

“I think I can still play, and I’d like a chance to find out if I can,” said Yeager, 39, who retired in April, 1987. “I don’t like the way I left the game. It wasn’t my decision, and I want it to be my decision. I want to have the satisfaction of knowing I gave it one last shot.”

Now a co-owner of a car leasing company, he is not even a catcher in the movie. Instead, he has a small part as third base coach Duke Temple. He only goes behind the plate as a stunt double for Berenger.

And the reason he’s available for this sort of work is that, after being traded to the Seattle Mariners in 1986, he was banished to the bench by then-manager Dick Williams. He hit only .208 in 50 games that season, his contract was not renewed that winter and he was ignored the next spring, except for one club that wanted to pay him less than the major league minimum. So he quit.

But World Series heroes rarely go gently into the night. And why should Yeager, who rarely went gently into anything?

His 1981 Series award, shared with Pedro Guerrero and Ron Cey, was an award for survival. This was a team huddled under the last threads of its greatness, and Yeager was a guy who, in a career that hadspanned 10 summers, was baseball’s best player never to be named an all-star.

“That’s how that 1981 team was different from these current Dodgers,” Yeager said. “For some reason, we all felt like that year was our last chance at anything.”

How well Yeager fit in then. And how well he would fit in with the Dodgers today. In helping the 1981 team defeat the New York Yankees, 4 games to 2, he didn’t even start in one of those games, and he was taken out in the third inning for a pinch-hitter in another. For the Series, he was third on the team in RBIs (4) and fourth in batting average (.286).

Yet when someone was needed to help pull the Dodgers out of a 2-games-to-none deficit, the guy who showed up was Yeager. With the Dodgers trailing, 2 games to 1, Yeager’s pinch-hit sacrifice fly in the seventh inning of Game 4 gave them an 8-7 win to even it up.

And the next day, in the seventh inning, with the score having just been tied, 1-1, on Guerrero’s homer, Yeager followed with another homer to left-center field to win Game 5 and give the Dodgers the momentum they needed to take Game 6 and the World Series title.

“(Ron) Guidry tried to put an 0-and-2 fastball by me,” Yeager said, laughing. “The same ball he threw Pete, and I think put it right in the spot, in the same lap.

“You don’t hit too many homers in the World Series so, yeah, you remember each one of them.”

If only that was all he remembered. Also ranking up there is his recollection of how he left the Dodgers, on Dec. 11, 1985, while he was on a cruise ship.

‘We stopped at some port, and (teammate) Rick Monday got off and some Dodger fan with a satellite dish told him that he had heard about the trade,” Yeager recalled of the deal that sent him to the Mariners for Ed Vande Berg. “It was a little disappointing they couldn’t get hold of me and tell me first.

“It was really hard, a really big change, to go from beautiful Dodger Stadium and the great Dodger organization to play in, what do they call that, the Silverdome?”

That’s how much he liked Seattle. It’s called the Kingdome, and Yeager’s biggest thrill that year was waving goodby to it in October.

Two years and one movie later, we don’t want to say Yeager is missing baseball and the Dodgers even more than ever, but in “Major League,” check out his number.

“I took No. 8, because of Joe Amalfitano,” Yeager said. “That’s the third base coach I’ve loved the most.”

He paused. “I’m telling you, I’m ready to go out there and play again. I really think I am.”