At Last, It’s Time to Play Ball - Game 1: The San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics have filled their days off with idle chatter. But the talk will give way to baseball today in the Oakland Coliseum.

Baseball players bore easily, even the best of them, which is one reason today’s World Series opener between the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants won’t be starting a minute too soon.

In the interests of team unity and sanity, neither club can afford another day off.

“We’ve got to start taking care of business,” San Francisco first baseman Will Clark griped Friday. “That’s been the problem--there’s been no business the last four days.”

You know what they say about idle hands? Welcome to the devil’s workshop by the bay, where stir-crazy Giants and stir-crazy A’s discovered novel ways to while away the time after prematurely ending the World Series preliminaries last Monday.

Kevin Mitchell, San Francisco’s 47-home run man, went AWOL, deciding it was a good time to close a real estate deal, and missed a day of practice. He was heavily fined.

Jose Canseco offered free World Series tickets to callers of the Jose Hotline, but only if they listen long enough--$12 worth--to hear the pick-up address. Canseco was chided in the papers as greedy, which prompted him to walk out of interviews.

The Toronto Blue Jays, continuing to harp about Oakland reliever Dennis Eckersley and his alleged emery board in the American League playoffs, sent a videotape to the commissioner’s office, saying it contains graphic evidence of Eckersley hiding the file in his uniform pants.

Oakland Manager Tony La Russa lashed out at Bobby Valentine, the Texas manager who doubled as a playoff broadcaster, and accused him of planting the evil seed about Eckersley in the Toronto dugout.

Oakland pitcher Dave Stewart said he liked Canseco but wondered aloud if Canseco would ever grow up, if he really liked himself and if he really cared if other people liked him.

Clark took a shot at long-departed Giant Jeffrey Leonard, describing his former teammate as “a tumor” who “made my life miserable” and applauded the trade that sent Leonard to Milwaukee in 1988.

Leonard responded from his new home in Seattle, calling Clark “a prejudiced bastard” who caused tension in the 1987 Giant clubhouse with racial remarks, and accused Clark of choking in the 1987 National League playoffs.

Play ball, anyone?

“All the players are (upset) because we’ve had to wait four days to get it going,” Clark said Friday. “We’re tired of it. I’ll be happy to get it started.”

So will weary newspaper readers across the continent. Has this last week been “Waiting for the World Series” or “Waiting for Godot?” Without a doubt, nonsense has reigned since the Giants and the A’s eliminated the Cubs and the Blue Jays each in five games, opening up too much time on the winners’ pre-Series schedules.

So maybe Chicago and Toronto are to blame, for failing to put up a long enough fight.

Then again, as Clark handily suggested, there’s always the press.

“You guys have been trying to gold-dig for the last three or four days,” Clark told reporters at the Oakland Coliseum Friday. “You’ve brought up stuff on Kevin Mitchell and now you’re working on me . . . “All of this bothers us a lot. Everything you do during the season is taken for granted--and now it’s all blown out of proportion. Even my parents were called and bugged at home.

“If we didn’t have all this time off, you guys wouldn’t have time to do all this gold-digging.”

At last, the mind games give way to the real games today when Stewart opposes San Francisco’s Scott Garrelts in Game 1 of the first Bay Area World Series. Players and managers will again get to speak of hits, runs and errors.

Friday, however, represented a final exercise in damage control for both teams. And pains were taken to mend fences and close ranks.

Clark wrapped up his running debate with Leonard tersely, saying: “I had something to say and got it off my chest. He had something to say and got it off his chest. End of story.”

And Stewart had this to say about Canseco:

“The bottom line on Jose Canseco is, if somebody asks me, that I like Jose Canseco as a person and a teammate. But not all the time. It’s like a marriage. Eighty-percent of the time, you don’t like your wife.

“I didn’t like my wife. I didn’t like my kids every day. But, you work with them and you work through those times. Same thing with Jose.

“There are times when I don’t like him. There are times when he doesn’t like me. That’s the way the world is.”

And, apparently, that’s the way this World Series is going to be.

Clark’s news conference was beginning to bog down--someone mentioned Leonard and Clark declared that “those questions are over with”--so another writer stepped in to keep the conversation rolling.

“How about those A’s?” the writer deadpanned.

Good question, that.

The A’s are back in the World Series, set upon rectifying the wreck of ‘88, when their 104 regular-season victories were rendered meaningless in five games against Orel Hershiser and the Dodgers.

They are back, with Mike Moore in their starting rotation and Rickey Henderson at the top of the batting order. Moore won 19 games during the regular season and Henderson almost won the American League championship series by himself.

Playoff MVP by acclamation, Henderson batted .400 with two home runs, five RBIs and a record eight stolen bases in five games against Toronto.

“Naturally, Rickey Henderson’s the key,” Giant Manager Roger Craig said. “We have to keep him off base. . . .

“He’s like Vince Coleman. He might be even better. It’s almost like when you walk him, you’re giving up a triple. He can get things started.”

Just how good a base stealer is Henderson?

“Maybe the best the world has even seen,” Craig said.

And after Henderson, the next five names in the Oakland batting order for Game 1 read:

--Carney Lansford, who hit .336 and lost the league batting title to Minnesota’s Kirby Puckett on the last day of the season.

--Canseco, who hit 17 home runs and drove in 57 runs after missing the first half of the season with a wrist injury.

--Dave Parker, who had 22 home runs and 97 RBIs in 1989.

--Dave Henderson, the postseason specialist who had 15 home runs and 80 RBIs during the 162-game tuneup.

--Mark McGwire, Bash Brother II, who added 33 home runs and 95 RBIs.

It’s a formidable lineup, one that makes the A’s favorites to beat their Bay brethren, but then, they were saying similar things about the A’s and the Dodgers last October.

“It strikes me that they’ve got it won in their own minds already,” Giant center fielder Brett Butler said. “They keep saying, ‘We’re going to do this, going to do that.’

“That’s fine. Let’s go out and play.”

And the Giants do have a few cards to play.

San Francisco’s 1-2 punch of Clark and Mitchell may be the best in baseball. Mitchell led the major leagues in home runs and Clark batted a staggering .650 with eight RBIs in the playoffs against the Cubs.

The Giants also have a power threat in third baseman Matt Williams, who hit 18 home runs, and a baserunning threat in Butler, who stole 31 bases, but the bottom third of their lineup--Terry Kennedy at .239, Candy Maldonado at .217 and Jose Uribe at .235--represents a veritable cliff drop.

If it comes down to pitching, the A’s appear to have the Giants bettered, too. After Stewart, 21-9, Oakland can counter with Moore, 19-11, Storm Davis, 19-7, and Bob Welch, 17-8, with Eckersley and his 33 saves in the bullpen.

San Francisco has Garrelts, the National League earned-run average leader at 2.28, and Rick Reuschel, the All-Star game starter. But after that, Craig is left with a hobbled Don Robinson, his scheduled Game 3 starter, and Mike LaCoss, who had a 9.00 ERA in the playoffs.

“They might have a slight edge in pitching,” Craig conceded. “But in a seven-game series, you can throw that out.”

Another thing about this seven-game series: It’s finally here.

Time to throw baseballs instead of invective.

Time to see which side of the bay plays as good a game as it talks.