Orange County Voices : COMMENTARY ON THE NATIONAL PASTIME : Baseball No Longer Needs Ladies’ Day to Lure the Female Fan : Still, the Angels might do a better job of marketing their sport to women, who make up 40% of the major league audience.

Way before my mother thought I was old enough to go, my father began taking me to baseball games. Opening Day was the best. That was the one day that my father’s hard-luck team, the New York Giants, and my own team, the glorious Yankees, were absolutely equal.

True, April in New York can be chilly, but what does that matter when you have left school early to join the faithful in the stands, your father’s jacket around your shoulders?

Now another season is about to begin, and I find that Opening Day remains a time fragrant with possibilities.

Like many fans, I wax foolishly nostalgic over the wonder of it all. Besides, California Angels boosters have already experienced a couple of good omens for the coming season: Bo Jackson hit a grand slam in his first at-bat during spring training in the Cactus League; and Jimmie Reese, our conditioning coach, has suited up for his 78th year in baseball.

What is Opening Day, if not a time of hope and renewal?

As a woman, I think this season of baseball may prove especially fruitful. I have watched Ila Borders pitch her heart out on a quiet Costa Mesa field for the Southern California College Vanguards; I have followed the tryouts for the Colorado Silver Bullets, a professional women’s club that will play a 30-game schedule against minor-league men’s teams. It is my hope that this is the season in which we shall begin reading stories that focus upon these women’s on-field performances rather than their sex.

I grew up, you see, believing that a love for the national pastime was a genderless issue. It is not.

Organized baseball has long been ambivalent toward its women, even as fans.

The game’s 19th-Century patriarchs were not at all certain that women should be encouraged to attend games. Realizing that profits were involved, however, early club owners instituted Ladies’ Day, which saved a number of financially struggling franchises.

Nevertheless women on the loose were evidently of some concern, so many clubs required that a fan of the “fair sex” variety be accompanied by a male escort. Not wanting to whine about the injustice of it all, we sang, which explains the early popularity of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

Mostly we have behaved ourselves at the ballpark. Oh, there are the anomalies--remember Morgana, “the Kissing Bandit” who often bounced onto the diamond to steal a kiss from players? But for the most part, it has been a good match. Over the past 150 years, women and baseball have come a long way together, surviving the evolution of Ladies’ Day into such exotic variations as Hot Pants Night (this in St. Louis during the 1970s).

In recent decades, women have actually sustained the game’s claim to be the national pastime, as men have abandoned baseball--”I’d rather watch paint dry!”--for football, basketball and hockey. In 1990, we made up over 40% of Major League Baseball’s fan base. We, it turns out, are the faithful.

When you go to Anaheim Stadium this season, take a look around. You’ll see women like Helen Hannah Campbell of Fountain Valley. A longtime Angels Booster Club member, she’ll be handing out promotions. She’ll be easy to spot in her team jacket, her silver hair shining beneath her Angel cap.

Ask her just about anything about the game, and she’ll know the answer. That’s understandable; Campbell made her first trip to the ballpark at 3 weeks of age in the company of her father, James Harrison (Truck) Hannah, who played with Babe Ruth on the 1920 Yankees. (You can also bet that a bunch of “the girls” from Campbell’s days as chaperon in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League will frequently turn up at the ballpark.)

So you won’t find Ladies’ Day on the Angels’ calendar this season. There is no longer any need to lure us to the ballpark. We show up in droves--with or without escorts. These days, it is as likely to be a mother as a father who initiates a child into the wonders of the game on a cool April evening.

Yet more can be done. The Angels might offer a seminar for female fans as the Chicago White Sox have done. That team has gathered women from the sports media and the front office to talk over the game with female fans. A brief history of our association with the game would also help.

Such programs would imbue a deeper meaning to that anthem we shall soon sing during seventh-inning stretch. Oh, we’ll still sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” for the plain joy of being there. But at this, the beginning of yet another season when the standings are all even, let us sing for Ila Borders and the Silver Bullets too.