A Season Begins as a Life Ends : Television: Baseball’s opening day and the dignity of the late Ryan White inspire memories.

Baseball and Ryan White shared television Monday: The all-American game and the all-American boy.

For baseball, it was another opening day, the first spread across the screen by ESPN in its debut as America’s primary TV venue for America’s primary pastime.

Due to the contract tribulations of Brent Musburger, most of the pre-season publicity went to CBS, which begins its own slim 16-game telecast slate Saturday. In telecasting six games a week, however, it’s ESPN that will become the true successor to NBC and ABC as TV’s major showcase for major league baseball, even though 40% of the nation is unwired for cable.

Although a Cubs-Phillies rain-out after two innings denied viewers the third component of ESPN’s scheduled triple-header, Monday was still TV’s busiest baseball opening ever.

For White, it was closing day, in effect, as “Donahue” again reran the hour it did with him 18 months ago when he sat alone on a stage and answered questions from youngsters who were curious about his AIDS and how he was dealing with it.

White was 18 when he died Sunday. The sight of him on the screen the next day, as if he had not died, produced not tears but much sadness, and also appreciation for the life he led and the one he might have led had he not contracted AIDS in 1984 as the result of a blood transfusion.

One could not help being impressed, amazed and inspired while watching him on that “Donahue” program on KNBC. He was incredible, and he was so giving, patiently and without bitterness explaining the nature of the illness that was draining his life, explaining his feelings about the prejudice that initially barred him from the school he had attended near Kokomo, Ind., and later drove him and his family from town. He even showed glints of humor.

It was obvious that in relatively few years, Ryan White had attained a level of dignity and wisdom that few attain in a lifetime. I can think of only two things comparable to his performance on TV that day in the face of adversity. One is a dying Lou Gehrig making his famous farewell speech to fans in Yankee Stadium in 1939, calling himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” The other is the optimism about humankind that Anne Frank recorded in her diary even as she hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam during World War II.

No wonder that a 1989 TV movie about White fell short, for in his own extremely quiet way, he was bigger than a single life.

Just as there’s something universal about Ryan White, a common denominator uniting us all in spite of the bigotry that hounded him in Kokomo, so is there something about baseball that threads American society. A filled ballpark is a community. Watching a game there or even in front of a TV set provides a sense of cohesion that may be impossible in another environment. Distractions melt away.

Perhaps that’s because each of us has a personal history with baseball, if not as a player, as a listener.

In Los Angeles, the broadcast icon has always been Vin Scully. Each opening day, however, I think of Larry Ray, the announcer for the pre-Athletics, pre-Royals Kansas City Blues of the old American Assn. When I was a boy in Kansas City, the Blues were the Yankees’ top farm club, using vastly superior talent to mop up the rest of the league, and Larry Ray was the team’s announcer on radio.

He was the Blues.

Ray did play-by-play of home games from Blues Stadium on Brooklyn Avenue and--to keep down costs--the road games from a ticker tape in a radio studio. These wire accounts offered only the bare minimum and lacked frills. However, Ray used his imagination to embellish and pump so much life into them (“And as Bob Cerv crosses home plate, he’s grinning from ear to ear”) that I had no idea he wasn’t actually in Columbus or Indianapolis or Minneapolis, seeing what he was describing.

Occasionally, Ray would report something from the wire that a few seconds later he’d discover to be a mistake, such as a pop out incorrectly called a home run. However, he’d backtrack so masterfully (“Hold it. Instead of going out of the park, that ball is caught by the third baseman”) that the original misstatement hardly seemed relevant.

There was something else that was distinctive about Ray. Seemingly no matter where a ball was hit to the outfield, he always found a way to describe it in proximity to a certain sign that was part of the outfield fence (“It landed in left center field, about 30 feet from the Cook Paint sign that says, ‘Best for wear and weather!’ ”). Something curious there.

Was there a Larry Ray in Ryan White’s history, I wonder?

Media coverage naturally focused on White’s AIDS, its impact on his life, and his impact on others. But surely there were other things that we should know about him. Did he like baseball? Being from the Midwest, perhaps he was a Reds fan, or a Cub fan. In a happier scenario, he might have been watching baseball start its season on ESPN Monday instead of starring on a “Donahue” posthumously.

Just as the struggle for survival eclipses everything, a rare life like Ryan White’s provides perspective. Baseball isn’t about living or dying. It’s only a game that has become a big business, something that matters far less than the battle against AIDS and other cosmic matters.

Yet metaphorically, at least, Ryan White will always be throwing out the first ball, grinning from ear to ear.