COMMENTARY : The Thieves of Time: Baseball, Football, Basketball, Hockey

Those time bandits are at it again. Each year, it appears, they are determined to steal a few more hours, a couple of additional days, even an extra week from our lives. They appear to work independently but their overall impact is debilitating.

Once, an individual sport was tied to a season. It wasn’t only a figure of speech but a specific period of the year. Baseball was the summer game, football occupied the fall and basketball and hockey were reserved for winter. The spillover was so slight that the two-sport athlete at the professional level was not treated as a freak of nature.

Yes, long before Bo, it wasn’t a big deal to know about a lot of things. But then the sports entrepreneurs began to fiddle with the calendar. They added teams, they added games, they started their seasons earlier and they ended their seasons later. And thanks to television, which encouraged more of everything, we began to get bombarded all year with images of sky walkers and masked goaltenders and acrobatic receivers and hard-throwing left-handers, sometimes all on the same day.

There is no escaping now. Sports demand more of our attention, more of our time every year. Forget the status quo. It isn’t a successful year for any professional sports organization unless it strengthens its hold on the public.

Sometimes, as in the case of the National Hockey League, the alteration is subtle. Three years ago, the NHL increased the first round of its four-round Stanley Cup playoffs from a best-of-five to a best-of-seven series. However, it continued the policy of no days off between games other than for travel. This year, they are dropping the other skate. There will be a day off between all games in the first round, days that will extend the season.

Not so subtle is the escalation announced last week by the National Football League. The 1990 playoffs will be two games longer, thanks to the addition of a third wild-card team in each conference. But that’s only the beginning of a revamped NFL schedule calculated to give TV networks more opportunities to earn back the staggering sums they are being required to pay for broadcast rights.

There will be 17 weeks of competition this year and next, although the number of regular-season games played by each team will remain at 16. In 1992, the schedule will be stretched over 18 weeks, permitting two dark weeks for each team and two additional weeks for the networks to recoup their investment through advertising. As a result, the Super Bowl, starting with XXVII at a site to be designated, will be pushed into the month of February. Now there’s a breakthrough.

Consider that the championship game credited with launching the NFL into the national consciousness, the Baltimore Colts’ 23-17 overtime triumph over the Giants in New York at the end of the 1958 season, was played Dec. 28. Until the advent of the Super Bowl after the 1966 season, the latest any championship contest had been held was Jan. 2. And now the league is looking to score points in February, a slow month for sports on television.

As recently as 1977, the NFL was committed to a 14-game regular-season schedule that began in mid-September and culminated with two weekends of playoff games building to the Super Bowl. The championship game was played in mid-January. In 1978, the 16-game schedule was introduced and a second wild-card team was added to each conference, necessitating an additional weekend of playoff competition. The season began in early September and ended in late January.

The 1992 season will encompass 23 weekends. “We are very fortunate that most surveys rank NFL football as America’s favorite spectator sport,” Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said in the announcement. “This new schedule format allows us to expand our share of the sports calendar.”

Clearly, one of the best things about the North American sports calendar is its elasticity. Want to raise more money? No problem, just lengthen the season. Twenty-five years ago, the NHL season ended in early May; now it’s late May. The NBA champion that in 1965 was determined in late April will be crowned in June, 1990. And we have yet to hear from baseball, which once had a monopoly on springtime as well as summer.

Baseball has been spinning its wheels this year while the owners and players try to form an improved working relationship. But should the start of the regular season April 2 be postponed, you may rest assured that someone on the side that pays the bills will propose extending the season, now scheduled to end Sept. 30.

Recall that in 1981, when the players walked off the job in June and didn’t return until August, the people in charge devised the split season in which an additional playoff series was authorized in each league. The result, beyond some shoddy baseball, was a World Series match-up between two teams, the New York Yankees and the Dodgers, who didn’t even have the best overall records in their divisions.

Baseball in November? It almost happened last year as a result of the earthquake in the Bay Area. Then again, it almost happened in 1986, when the worst natural disaster was a single day of rain. It will happen someday soon as sure as there is hockey in May, basketball in June and football in February.

Remember the Stanley Cup scene in Buffalo, N.Y., when fog formed on the ice because of the humidity in the building? Observers in Boston Garden have taken to carrying battery-operated fans to combat the heat for the NBA finals. Bowie Kuhn had to wear long johns to watch a World Series game when he was commissioner. Minor inconveniences, all.

As the proprietors of our games have indicated, there is a time and a place for each team sport. It is everywhere and it is any time.