Take Me Out to a <i> Real </i> Ballgame : Baseball: The vulgar marketing mentality that rules today may destroy the game as we know and love it.

Every few years, a kindly Providence arranges the calendar so that Opening Day follows hard on the heels of Easter. And fittingly enough; although the coincidence can lead to a dangerous overload in the piety circuits of a Christian--like me, for example--who happens to find in baseball a foretaste of the time-beyond-time that is the Kingdom to come. But lead us not into the temptation of ingratitude.

However, anyone who cares about the pastime has to approach this new season with foreboding. No one knows how the new three-division league format will work out. But when the Lords Temporal who control the game decreed that it was no longer necessary to finish first in order to qualify for post-season play (the second-place team with the best record among the three divisions in each league will participate in a new round of playoffs), they may have consigned one of baseball’s greatest pleasures--the pennant race that rivets our attention from the dog days of summer to the first turning of the fall leaves--to the dustbin of history.

Just as ominously, baseball continues to be racked by labor troubles. The owners, whose lack of self-discipline drove free-agent salaries through the roof and made the game’s economics increasingly insane, seem determined to break the players’ union. The union insists against all common sense that a fair-to-middling second baseman who hits .250 and still makes $1 million a year is really a wage slave. All of which may result in a season-wrecking strike in September.

Then there is management’s determination to transform a sport into an “total entertainment experience,” with somersaulting mascots, gyrating ballgirls, exploding scoreboards, pounding rock music and all the other nonsense that is meant to entertain people who don’t belong in the ballpark in the first place. This is supposed to attract families. I despair for the families who have to be “entertained” this way. (One of my proudest moments as a parent came when my 14-year-old daughter glared with icy disdain at a middle-aged woman trying to do “the wave” in Baltimore’s Camden Yards and informed her, “This isn’t San Diego.”)

But when fears for baseball’s future begin to spoil my pleasure over its present, I turn my mind to the Pacific Northwest, where my friend Jerry Cohen, one of the last of the true believers, is mounting a defiant campaign against the dumbing-down of the pastime.

Cohen is a 35-year-old entrepreneur who runs Ebbets Field Flannels out of an old warehouse near the Seattle waterfront. And what, you ask, is Ebbets Field Flannels? It appears to be a mail-order company whose wares are vintage baseball jerseys and hats from the minor leagues, the old Negro and Federal leagues and the Latin American leagues. But far more is going on here than a successful entry into the burgeoning sports-apparel market. For Cohen is, at heart, the historian of an American folk art: the design and manufacture of baseball uniforms. And his catalogue reveals an originality, a symmetry, indeed a beauty and an intricacy of detail that is reminiscent of auction books in which Amish quilts are on offer. Moreover, Cohen has kept a tradition of American artisanship alive by defying the modernist heresy of polyester and using only original materials, created the old-fashioned way: meaning classic baseball flannel, felt and rayon, plus intricate chain-stitching or chenille lettering.

Fans will plunk down about $3 billion this year for licensed baseball paraphernalia. Almost all of the apparel items are junk. To anyone with the slightest sense of the history and aesthetics of the sport, the trashy baseball-apparel boom is just one more depressing example of game’s corruption by the contemporary American addiction to glitz and “entertainment.”

By keeping alive a memory of the days when it really was a game--a game that defined a part of the American soul--Jerry Cohen is giving his friends and customers more than a trip down memory lane. Cohen’s is a business, sure. But it’s a business whose reverence for tradition challenges the vulgar marketing mentality that is threatening to destroy major league baseball.