It’s Spring but It’s All So Different for Yankees : Baseball: No-name players, a smattering of fans and major-league void part of atmosphere at exhibition opener.

It certainly looks like any other spring training. It smells like any other spring training, since Casey Stengel replaced the traditional weighty sandwiches with the nouvelle soup. It probably tastes like any other spring as well.

“The soup is minestrone,” said Nick Priore, the New York Yankees’ veteran clubhouse man. “I think it is.” More appropriately, it should have been mock turtle.

This is replacement baseball. Lite baseball. It looks like baseball. It looked professional when the Yankees played the Los Angeles Dodgers in the first exhibition game of the false spring. The Yankees wore the pinstripes with the monogrammed NY over the heart. “It’s an honor to be out there in pinstripes,” said John DiGirolamo, whose best credential is the Most Valuable Player Award in the Bergen County semi-pro Met League last summer. He was out there in the footsteps of Bernie Williams and Mickey Mantle in center field.

“For now,” he quickly added. He is a replacement player to be judged in the eye of the beholder, for now. He wore No. 50. Not too many eyes were beholding.

“Not too busy,” said the vendor of Via Veneto Italian ices, lonely in the plaza that’s normally throbbing for the first exhibition game at Fort Lauderdale Stadium. This is the Yankees’ last spring here after 33 seasons in which the opener has been a hot event. Last season the announced crowd was 6,664. Thursday the Yankees said they sold 1,384 tickets and the crowd in the house may have been half that. Conspicuous by its absence in this land of sun and fun was the acres of tanning female skin that’s always drawn by big-league glamour.

The Yankees are cutting the salaries of some of their front-office personnel, to which public relations man Rob Butcher responded, “Another day, another ninety cents.”

You couldn’t tell the players without a scorecard. The Yankees’ scorecard presented numbers up to 95, not counting staff, and included 0 and Double 0. Never before have the Yankees had 0 and 00, said Priore, who has been around since 1961. And where once were personalized Louisville Sluggers in the lockers were generic baseball bats.

Fans stayed away for their own reasons, perhaps out of respect for a strike, perhaps turning away out of respect for baseball or just good sense. “We’re not going to pass these off as major-league players; we’re not going to try to fool the public,” Dodger Manager Tom Lasorda said.

“If you ask me to your house and you ask me what I want for dinner, I’d say linguini. But if you don’t have linguini, I’ll eat something else.”

When he’s not near the players he loves, he loves the players he’s near. He professes this loyalty to Dodger Blue, and to baseball, but he can abide with the level of play.

The Dodgers insist these aren’t replacement games for them. They went about this business differently from the Yankees, who have replacement players. The Dodgers say 22 of the 27 players they have ready to play were in their system last year. Fred Claire, the general manager, said he presented the alternatives to these players--the union side and the Dodgers’ side--sweetened the finances somewhat for the players who agreed to play, and promised that there would be a job in the organization for every one of them.

“Some of them we will add to the 40-man roster,” Lasorda said. “We did not sign guys out of baseball three or four years.” He’s not embarrassed by the talent level of the players he put on the field Thursday, or by his own presence managing them. “I signed to manage the Dodgers,” he said. “They didn’t say who was going to be on that team.”

The distinction between the Dodgers and Yankees was apparent to a number of Yankees watching the Dodgers in batting practice. Lasorda says his embarrassment is for Baseball with a capital B. “I worry about that,” he said, “when I read Pedro Borbon signed with the Reds. I don’t like that one bit.”

These players aren’t going to take jobs from the real big-leaguers. When they come back to work, these Dodgers will take the jobs of players lower down and lower down, the way it always is in baseball. The issue is on top. Neither players nor owners have ever given much consideration to the fans--ever. Maybe 6,000 empty seats for the cornerstone franchise is a message. If the season begins like this, it will be ugly.

Uglier than the 11-3 drubbing the Yankees suffered. Early spring games are often ragged and messy. This one had enthusiasm and optimism, however hollow, and the return of Mickey Rivers as a spring training instructor for the Yankees after an absence of 15 years. It was nice to see Gozzlehead. “You’re glad to see me for a change,” he said. It often was unclear just what Gozzlehead meant by what he said.

It was quite clear what the Yankees’ replacement players intended by their presence. “I look at this as a great opportunity to get big-league managers to look at me and to open their eyes,” said Kevin Riggs, who played third base. He hit .296 in double-A in his fifth season last year.

Frank Eufemia, the Yankees’ opening day starter, pitched a tidy three innings and pronounced, “A couple more outings and I’ll have my slider where I want it.” He last was 1-3 in triple-A in 1992.

The second pitcher, Brian Faw, spent his second season in double-A last season after four in single-A. He allowed five runs in one inning. “I wanted to start right, but I can only build on this,” he said. “Today might have some positives among the negatives.”

He thought he did well getting a double-play grounder on a changeup. Mike Tosar, playing second base, made a good stop behind the base, had trouble getting the ball out of his glove and made an impossible-to-handle throw to second. The next Dodger hit a drive to the base of the center-field wall. DiGirolamo went back, heard the right fielder shout, “wall, wall,” and pulled up. Tosar and DiGirolamo said they would love to have those chances to catch somebody’s eye again.

“I’d love him to catch that ball,” Faw said. “The other guy still hit the heck out of the ball. I guarantee I’ll pitch better each and every outing.”

Yes, Pat Kelly sometimes fails to come up with the big play and sometimes Bernie Williams doesn’t catch everything in sight, and Jimmy Key isn’t always perfect. “Being an athlete,” Faw said, “sometimes I’m going to suck.”

He said whatever historic significance they had in playing the first replacement game would come only as the spring developed. “It’s not going to be Little -Leagueish,” he insisted. His evidence was the two thunderbolts Jay Kirkpatrick hit over the wall off Nelson Perpetuo and Art Canestro. Historically, this has not been an easy ballpark for left-handed hitters. But would he have hit them off Jimmy Key?

Nick Priore, the clubhouse man, clasped his hands and looked upward. “Babe, don’t worry about it,” he said. “We’ll get it straightened out.”