BASEBALL / ROSS NEWHAN : While Turner Tried to Cure World, Kasten Fixed Braves

Is it possible that the world turned better for the Atlanta Braves because owner Ted Turner has been less involved, distracted by his attempt to improve the world?

“That’s nonsense,” said Stan Kasten, president of both the Braves and the Atlanta Hawks, Turner’s NBA team.

“If Ted devoted the time to running the Braves that he does to everything else, he would be just as successful at it, but he’s involved with issues of global importance.”

Kasten is biased, of course. He isn’t going to bite the hand that feeds him, the same hand that would like to feed the hungry, save the rain forests, eliminate the nuclear threat, preserve the ozone layer and, as someone might have already recommended, ensure domestic tranquility.

The improbable Braves need only one more victory to win the World Series, but that doesn’t compare to the serious business of the world, which “will not be saved or lost whether the Braves win the World Series or not.”

That is what Turner told interviewer David Frost on a TV special shown Friday night. Atlanta fans may stop their tomahawk chops long enough to disagree, but this is where Turner’s priorities now rest.

He has his Goodwill Games and the Better World Society and an eco-hero named Captain Planet, whom he may cheer louder than he does Steve Avery, the Braves’ starting pitcher in Game 6 of the Series tonight.

After all, it was Captain Planet’s caricature on the back of a jacket that Turner’s fiancee, Jane Fonda, was wearing at Game 4 Wednesday night.

Once one of the zaniest and most involved of owners, Turner is now hands-on only in the context of the wooing and cooing he and Fonda have been seen doing these last six spellbinding weeks at Brave games.

Turner seldom attends the quarterly owners’ meetings, sending Kasten and Board Chairman Bill Bartholomay.

General Manager John Schuerholz, who was hired last year without meeting Turner and given financial carte blanche to acquire free agents Terry Pendleton and Sid Bream, said that before the current postseason period, he had spoken with his employer only three times this year and then only socially.

And even now, Ted and Jane arrive at the Series each night shortly before the first pitch and leave soon after the last, commuting to home games in a mid-size sedan that seems a long way from the limousines of his previous life.

This is the same Ted Turner who once said: “If you can’t do anything else, make a lot of noise.”

And the same Ted Turner who:

--Managed the Braves for one game in the 1977 season and is actually listed in the Braves’ media guide as one of the club’s ex-managers.

--Was fined and suspended by the National League for tampering with Gary Matthews before he became a free agent.

--Signed baseball’s first free agent, Andy Messersmith, and made George Steinbrenner and Gene Autry appear penurious with his spending on suspect mercenaries.

--Was so close to his players that he was ordered by the NL to stop playing poker with them in the clubhouse.

--Kept a microphone in his private box so that he could apologize for his team’s poor play.

--Personally swapped Brett Butler and Brook Jacoby for Len Barker in one of a series of lamentable trades made while envisioning himself as a general manager capable of skippering the Braves’ ship in the same way he successfully defended the 1977 America’s Cup.

--Encountered Reggie Jackson in a crowded New York restaurant and loudly offered him $1 billion to play for the Braves.

--Eventually concluded: “It’s obvious some owners shouldn’t be owners and maybe I’m one of them.”

He stopped being a vocal one, for all intents, in November of 1986 when he asked Kasten, already president of the Hawks, to take on the Braves’ presidency as well.

Since then, Kasten said, the Braves have been run by baseball people in the same way the Hawks are run by basketball people.

“Ted’s all over the globe and is very comfortable with the arrangement,” Kasten said. “He gives us tremendous support and unlimited resources because he trusts us. I’ve never been turned down.”

In Turner’s 14 years as owner, the Braves have lost 90 or more games nine times, but their 300 losses of the last three years were deceiving to an extent.

Bobby Cox, as general manager, was laying a foundation of young pitching, and the Braves paid a price in the process. Cox went back to the duguout, where he is more comfortable, and Schuerholz arrived to apply the finishing touches, giving the organization the right people in the right places, according to Kasten.

It isn’t known if the inquisitive Turner would trade a World Series title for three days in the biosphere, but he is genuinely excited by this worst-to-first trip, Kasten said.

“Ted loves baseball and wants to win,” Kasten added. “Wherever he is, he’s never more than 10 minutes behind the score. The Braves are a small part of his company economically, but a very large part emotionally. Everyone gets a charge when the team wins.”

Turner’s cable empire has helped make the ’91 Braves “America’s team.” The owner, in the meantime, has his eye on the world.