COMMENTARY : Self-Destruction in Prime Time : Business: Baseball apparently is willing to televise its own downfall with a plan that trades fans for promises.

Suicidal is the only appropriate word for baseball’s new television plan.

Aside from its financial aspects, which even its advocates describe as risky, it is self-destructive. It demeans the product--the conducting of pennant races and all that implies, while offending and fragmenting its core audience and guaranteeing failure in stimulating new fans.

This is not because it violates tradition, a cry some use merely to resist constructive and necessary change. The trouble with this particular plan is not that it’s different, but that it’s bad.

Its consequences have not been thought through. Lessons learned through 100 years of experience, often painfully, have been ignored. And instead of giving baseball control of its own destiny, as its designers claim, it actually hands that control over to the advertising business.

The plan, as announced, has at least six major flaws:

--It ruins season-long pennant races.

--It brings into question the integrity of the game.

--It ignores baseball’s growth and the intense interest of its limited number of followers, and abandons their clearly established preferences without giving any indication of how and why it would then appeal to a larger and previously uninterested public.

--It undermines local--not regional, but local--radio and television arrangements that have been the lifeblood of baseball promotion for the last 40 years.

--It intensifies the already harmful conflict between players and management on the labor front.

--It assures eventual government intervention.

The fallacy of this plan is the underlying assumption that higher national television ratings, even if attainable, somehow improve the finances, appeal and long-range health of the baseball business.

Neither history nor logic indicates any such connection.

The television ratings game, rife with manipulation, tries to measure mass-audience response so it can set advertising and other rates, without regard to program content. Baseball, however, can thrive only to the extent that people are interested in the game. When baseball arouses enough interest, good ratings are a byproduct. Thus, manipulating schedules and competitive formats to boost ratings can’t do anybody any good if that adulterates the game.

And that’s what the new plan does.

1. Races--Creating an extra tier of playoffs is a good and progressive idea if carried out the right way. If each league had three divisions, and the four playoff qualifiers were the three divisional champions and the second-place team with the best record, that would be fine.

But the strongest proposal is to stay with two divisions and have both second-place teams qualify. That’s terrible.

With three divisions, you have four races--since the only guarantee of a playoff assignment is to finish first. The fourth race is among runners-up in different divisions.

With two divisions, you have no races at all. The first two teams are safe, and the only suspense is holding off a third-place challenger.

2. Integrity--Baseball will try to sell advertising time with the season in progress. Obviously, a New York-Los Angeles World Series will be worth more to advertisers than a Milwaukee-Houston World Series. Also, close races will sell more commercials in September than runaways. Does this create a temptation to “arrange” appropriate “attractions”?

Does baseball need to have such a question come to mind?

In accepting a flat fee for rights before a season, baseball--or any sport--is clean. All the risk for advertising revenue has been accepted by the buyer of the rights, who can hope for, but not control, an exciting outcome. But when baseball itself has a direct, immediate and significant stake in the value of commercial time, suspicions can be aroused, and plenty of rival promoters--in sports, in the media, in advertising--will be only too glad to foment them for their own purposes.

As far back as 1905, baseball authorities understood that the public would suspect manipulation if the players in the World Series got more money for playing more games. That’s why the players’ share was limited to only the first four.

Is that principle--that the competition on the field should be above suspicion--no longer operative?

In the TV ratings races, a key element has always been “quality of the script.” Does baseball plan to compete with that? And how will it withstand accusations that it has?

3. Nature of audience--Major league baseball sells about 55 million tickets a season. Buyers include many season ticket-holders and partial season ticket-holders, and, of course, fans attending several games a year on individual tickets. Using the extremely conservative average of five ballpark visits per customer, one gets about 11 million people who actually go to games.

That means there are 249 million Americans who do not.

There are, of course, additional millions who read about baseball games, watch them on television or hear them on the radio. But these are people who are attracted to baseball as we know it, just as the paying customers are. And when you add them all together, it’s still a minority of the total audience television tries to reach.

Major TV shows--sitcoms, dramas, special events (such as the World Series)--are of potential interest to the population at large. Daily baseball is not and cannot be. It is sustained by baseball fans. And as existing fans age, or are weaned away by something else, replenishment can come from only one source--children. How can telecasts in prime time possibly foster loyalty to baseball in a “next” generation that can’t watch it regularly, especially when it peaks in the playoffs and World Series?

Suppose you do get a bigger television audience occasionally, but you also stifle fan creation and alienate existing fans. Will television and advertisers still be eager to exhibit your product when attendance and other measures of interest--and revenue--start to fall off? If you defang the pennant races, shut out the kids, regionalize the climactic championship games and strip away the special aura built up over a century by blatantly joining the scramble as just another prime-time TV show, won’t the core audience shrink?

4. Local broadcasting--Because baseball fans want to follow their teams day by day, local radio and television play-by-play broadcasts have been a boon to both attendance and continuing interest, especially as the number of big-city newspapers has decreased. It is the prime connection between a team and its public.

The new plan cuts into local patterns by usurping certain dates--and, incidentally, decreasing the value of the local package. But the idea of “regionalizing” playoff games is the real danger. The six-month pennant race makes the survivors celebrities, the ones all baseball fans want to see. Neither geography nor league affiliation has anything to do with that.

And how would you regionalize in practice?

Suppose both teams from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or the Bay Area reach the playoffs. Will you show those markets only one team? Which one? Suppose none of those markets qualify. Which games will you send them?

Are fans in Connecticut more interested in the Red Sox or the Yankees? Would a Yankee-Baltimore playoff not go into Philadelphia because it’s a National League city? What is Denver’s region? Or Seattle’s or Miami’s?

And who will decide? Advertising agencies?

5. Labor relations--Whatever the intention, up-front national television money is a declaration of war to the players’ association. In pursuit of regulations that would lower salaries, which the players have fought against successfully for 20 years, the clubs will claim lack of revenue. At the same time, their potential revenue will be concentrated in the second half of the season, so there will be less to lose by engaging in a lockout or forcing a strike at the beginning of the 1994 season.

On top of that, forming a partnership with the players--the rhetoric of peace a few months ago--has been repudiated by forming a partnership with television instead.

Some baseball officials have preached for years that a final, all-out, to-the-death confrontation with the players is inevitable, necessary and winnable. Others disagree. But the new television plan brings that particular Armageddon closer.

6. Congressional intervention--The new plan is so obviously a prelude to pay television, despite all denials, that Congress is not likely to pass up the opportunity to step in on the side of voters.

Actually, free television is an illusion--we all pay at the checkout counter for the advertisers’ costs, whether we watch baseball or not--but it is an irresistibly powerful illusion. Indirect-pay television, through cable, is here now. But the storm the new arrangements will create--among viewers, players and local broadcasting interests--will constitute an invitation politicians are unlikely to refuse.

One fertile area for investigation, and bureaucratic opportunity, is conflict of interest. Several club owners--not only the Atlanta Braves and Chicago Cubs--have television and cable interests. The architects of this particular plan, Tom Werner and Eddie Einhorn, are more extensively involved in the television business than in baseball.

Werner got into baseball only three years ago and is actively trying to sell the San Diego Padres--piecemeal or all at once--while continuing his main business as a television producer. In a field notorious for side deals and tie-in arrangements, baseball’s representatives are dealing with the same advertising and broadcasting executives with whom they have other, and sometimes bigger, deals to make.

A biblical passage cites the folly of trading one’s birthright for a mess of pottage. In this plan, baseball seems to be trading its painstakingly accumulated assets for a mass of promises.

Baseball’s biggest asset, and the cornerstone of all major commercial spectator sports, is the perception that it’s special. Once it presents itself as merely another ratings-dictated entertainment in prime time, it subjects itself to an inflexible historical fact: All the most successful television shows, whatever their content or impact, disappear after a few years and are replaced by something else.

But “Perry Mason” and “I Love Lucy” can live on in reruns.

Can baseball?