COMMENTARY : THE WORLD SERIES : OAKLAND ATHLETICS vs. SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS : Bay’s Ball Not Capturing His Imagination

After six long days of waiting, Bay’s Ball is finally has begun, which unfortunately means we may have heard the last of the spellbinding stories that dominated the past week, keping so many of us on the edge of our seats:

Where is Kevin Mitchell?

What does Dennis Eckersley hide in his glove?

What do Will Clark and Jeffrey Leonard really think of each other?

America wants to know!

So as a public service I called a man who is available night and day to answer your most intimate baseball questions. I dialed 900-234-JOSE, the Jose Canseco hotline. It’s $2 for the first minute, and $1 for every additional minute, and let me tell you that boy can yak; midway in the sixth hour of Jose’s taped ramblings, the operator interrupted to ask me for a letter of credit since the bill had already exceeded my Visa limit.

Jose discoursed about steroids, guns and fast cars (advising drivers to “keep it under 55 if you can,” while at the same time saying how much he favors Lamborghinis and Porsches -- cars that’ll do 80 even when they’re parked). Then, after taking a breath, he brought us up to speed on the celebration after clinching the pennant in Toronto. “Someone stepped on my toe, and it’s still swollen,” Jose said. (I debated whether to call the sports desk, and tell them, “Hold page one!”) Describing the charter flight home, Jose confided, “Everybody was getting drunk. ... All the wives were making like cheerleaders. Boy, were they terrible. They were pretty drunk.” (I debated whether to call The Washington Post’s Style section.) He defamed the champagne they put in the clubhouse: “We call it ‘soap.’ It’s so terrible, nobody drinks it; it gives you the worst heartburn in the world.” (I really should’ve called The Post’s Food section.) Jose concluded, crowing, “What a great brother I am, I’m the best,” because he planned to buy his brother a Porsche 930. (I suppose I could have called Business.)

By late afternoon Jose had made a new tape. It began bizarrely, with his wife Esther joking how Jose “stuck the dog in the freezer last night” before Jose took control of the hotline. He picked the A’s to win in six games, laughing off his wife’s prediction of four -- “She’s crazy. She thinks we’re some kind of robots.” Eventually Jose got serious, advising kids: “Listen to your parents if they make sense, but don’t listen to them if they’re crazy.” He declined, however, to tell kids how they might distinguish this crucial difference, but, hey, you can’t expect the guy to spoonfeed you everything; I mean, would you ask Dr. Sigmund Freud how to hit the curveball?

I’m sure by Sunday, Jose will have something worthy to say about the new Woody Allen movie, the Joan Braden book and the Jane Pauley-Deborah Norville situation. But it breaks my heart to tell you that he had not one word on Mitchell, Eckersley or Clark and Leonard. I guess we’re on our own gang.

So let’s recap. Synchronize your watches. It’s 10 o’clock Pacific Daylight Time. Do you know where Kevin Mitchell is? When he skipped practice Wednesday, he said he was in San Diego closing on a house. (Sources tell me there are reports of Mitchell sightings in the Meadowlands, digging in the end zone, in Minneapolis, where he was one of the players traded for Herschel Walker, and in Panama, where Mitchell was allegedly checking on the telephone lines, making sure U.S. military officials had call forwarding.) “It was all a misunderstanding,” Mitchell said, explaining he thought practice was on Thursday. But this was hardly the first time Mitchell had gone off on his own. “Kevin is one of those people who isn’t a stickler for details,” his agent, Joe Sroba said. Mitchell’s behavior has angered management and players. But 47 homers and 125 RBI cuts you a wide hunk of slack. “He’ll bat fourth and play left,” someone said. “He could’ve come in with a dead body under his arm, and it wouldn’t have made a difference -- unless the body was Will Clark’s.”

On the sex, lies and videotape front, we anxiously await the possibility that Roger Craig will ask umpires to check Dennis Eckersley’s uniform for The Dwayne F. Schneider Starter Tool Kit. Allegedly, the Sky Dome in-house video caught The Eck stuffing sandpaper down his pants, and Toronto clubhouse boys reportedly found an emory board in The Eck’s glove. “If he’s cheating, I’ll catch him,” vowed Craig. Through his spokesman Gaylord Perry, Eckersley denied doing any scuffing or cutting of baseballs, and insisted the chainsaw reporters spotted in his locker was simply an early Christmas gift.

The Great Will Clark-Jeffrey Leonard Debates rage on. Earlier this week Clark called his former Giants teammate Leonard a “cancer,” then a “tumor.” (There is some thought that Clark recently bought a medical dictionary and he will next accuse Leonard of being a “pulmonary embolism.”) The Hac Man fired back, calling Clark “a prejudiced bastard,” accusing him of racial slurs. The name calling was the hot topic on Friday. Dusty Baker, the Giants’ hitting coach, volunteered how “this isn’t the kind of thing you want to read about in the paper. They should have fought it out between themselves.” Informed that Clark and Leonard did, indeed, fight last season, Baker shrugged and said, “They didn’t fight long enough.”