It’s Show Time : Bring out the peanuts, pass around the Cracker Jack and grab hold of the remote control

Baseball is television’s ultimate situation-comedy. It has cheers. It has evening shade in living color. It has bloopers, blunders and practical jokes. It has perfect strangers being good sports in America’s funniest videos. It has major dads who are married with children. It has more than one coach and even an occasional golden girl who’s the boss.

Baseball is also television’s ultimate game show. It puts players in jeopardy and takes classic concentration. It has flashing lights and a rowdy audience, boundless trivia and minutiae, a returning champion and contestants for whom the price is extremely high but not always right.

Baseball is also television’s ultimate soap opera. It has prolonged suspense accompanied by organ music. It has cliffhanger climaxes and mysterious developments that won’t be resolved until the next day. And somebody is always stealing something, or catching something, or running somebody down, or making sacrifices, or throwing somebody out at home.

No wonder minor-league players refer to the major leagues as “the Show.”

Baseball is back, after a winter’s hiatus. As a new season begins, with the usual mix of familiar characters and new cast members, there will be millions of fans in the stands. Yet there will be millions more who--thanks to TV and radio, baseball’s partners in lime--never miss a game even while never attending one. Or, as Yogi Berra of the New York Yankees once said: “If people don’t want to come out to the park, nobody’s gonna stop ‘em.”

Over a half-century and more, broadcasts have been part of baseball’s heritage. They have given us Red Barber thrice screaming: “The Giants win the pennant!” They have given us Don Larsen leaping into Berra’s hairy arms after pitching a perfect game and Carlton Fisk doing semaphore to persuade a batted ball not to misbehave. They have given us Lou Gehrig saying farewell to baseball and Kirk Gibson kissing one goodby.

The first radio transmission direct from the site of the game came in 1924, when Graham McNamee described a World Series contest between the Washington Senators and New York Giants. The famed Ring Lardner later wrote that the two teams “must have played a double-header this afternoon--the game I saw and the game Graham McNamee announced.”

Well, when you don’t go to the game, you pump up the volume and take your chances.

When Bill Stern worked a 1939 collegiate ballgame between Columbia and Princeton for a New York TV station, he began: “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the first telecast of a sporting event. I’m not sure what it is we’re doing here, but I certainly hope it turns out well for you people who are watching.”

Ever since, Americans have been twisting the radio knobs in their automobiles or sitting cross-legged before console televisions at home or sneaking mini-screen TVs into offices and classrooms, just to follow the bouncing ball. It is hardly uncommon to spot spectators at stadiums plugged into, say, Vin Scully or Harry Caray or Phil Rizzuto or Ernie Harwell, narrating for them the very action they are seeing with their own eyes.

Of course, CBS banked on that sort of intense interest in the national pastime last season and ended up with a black eye the size of its corporate logo. Although the broadcast odd-coupling of Jack Buck with Tim McCarver took a while to take hold, the season itself was not nearly so troublesome as the World Series, which lasted the absolute minimum of four games and stuck CBS with a fat tab that the beer and shoe-company sponsors might otherwise have covered.

The championship team unexpectedly turned out to be the Cincinnati Reds, owned and operated by car dealer Marge Schott and Schottzie the St. Bernard, whom she treated, according to some of her players, better than she did some of her players. Portions of the World Series itself were played--for the third straight year--in California, with Oakland having been involved in all three years. Cincinnati is the only non-California team to appear in the Series since 1987.

For their 1991 pursuit of the Reds, the West Coast division rivals have some new hired hands:

Darryl Strawberry is the tower of power who is expected to boost the Dodgers in the ratings as well as in the standings. Outfielder Brett Butler, pitcher Bob Ojeda and catcher Gary Carter are also new to the blue.

In San Diego, new arrivals decked out in new uniforms include two All-Stars, slugger Fred McGriff and infielder Tony Fernandez, procured from Toronto in one of the biggest deals in the Padres’ history. There are new stars to be gazed upon in San Francisco, too, the Giants having picked up batting champion Willie McGee and relief pitcher Dave Righetti.

Oakland’s reign in the American League, meantime, is something the ambitious California Angels are attempting to challenge by means of acquiring proven hitters Dave Parker and Gary Gaetti, who could give them sufficient power to do so.

That remains to be seen, as well as heard.

So, on with the Show.