SPORTS WATCH : Season of Potential

The baseball season has opened, with all its wonderful possibilities and potential for human frailty.

The ever-amazing Bo Jackson is playing in Anaheim, and long-shot teams like the Angels are looking for reasons to believe under major league baseball’s divisional realignment. Chan Ho Park, a fine 20-year-old South Korean pitcher, is quickening hearts at Dodger Stadium, as manager Tom Lasorda pulls yet another young rabbit out of the hat. It’s become an annual debut of talent that fits nicely with spring’s sentiments.

But baseball is like life in other ways, too--full of trouble as well as promise. The Dodgers have gracefully given veteran Darryl Strawberry a reprieve from release to get treatment after he acknowledged a problem with drugs and alcohol. There’s a lesson here for starry-eyed youngsters and parents: No wealth of talent, money and celebrity offers exemption from the need to deal head-on with challenges.

Two teams, the Cleveland Indians and the Texas Rangers, have new ballparks and are stirring fresh hopes. Purists, meanwhile, understandably cringe at the breakup of the American League and National League into three divisions each, plus the introduction of the “wild card” factor to postseason play.

Yet we know that there is something magnetic for the soul in a game that lures basketball star Michael Jordan to ride its minor league buses, at least for now, after a spring tryout with the Chicago White Sox. Even if baseball sometimes disappoints, we know we cannot resist its return.