Baseball: Read Not Quite All About It : Times policy: If replacement players start season, coverage will be reduced to level of interest.

For the time being, the national pastime is passe. And so, unfortunately, will be the coverage of it in this newspaper.

Baseball is this romantic thing for many sports fans.

It is exhibition games in spring that mean, more than anything else, the end of winter. It is reliving one’s youth, with the memory of Billy Bruton’s game-winning home run in the first game ever played by the Braves in Milwaukee every bit as vivid as that of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald in that parking garage in Dallas.

But not this year.

Baseball is a throwback, a pastoral game that moves at a slow, time-for-a-hot-dog pace. It seldom changes its rules and flies in the face of sound bites, cell phones and CD ROM. To expand on a line from this paper’s Steve Harvey, while other sports surf the Internet with eyes to the future on figurative technology superhighways, baseball plods along a surface street.

But not this year.

This year, it is not even plodding. This year, the only game baseball is playing is a shell game.

And so, this paper will give the 1995 replacement players’ baseball season, or RPBS, if you like, what it is worth.

Not much.

The policy will be, in quick summary:

--Daily game coverage of local teams by Times staffers for the first two weeks, home and away, and then news service reports on road games, with stories running about half the length as in previous seasons.

--Daily roundups of the rest of the RPBS games in a tight, abbreviated style that will list minimal detail after the score.

--Regular expanded box scores for the Dodgers and Angels and old-style tabular boxes on other games.

--Daily league standings that include a disclaimer, saying these standings may or may not count because subsequent labor negotiations may do away with the results of these games.

--The same disclaimer on any listing of batting and pitching leaders, although these probably won’t run at least until May 1, if this foolishness goes on that long.

Our season advances next week will be non-traditional, to say the least. Dodger and Angel previews will describe the starting lineups and give readers a short look at who each player is, how old and which meat-packing firm he drove a truck for before the spring of 1995. The overview league advance will lean toward the anecdotal--the Three Stooges meet Tommy Lasorda.

One thing must be made clear. This approach does not signify an editorial stance that should be construed as pro-player or pro-owner. It signifies an editorial stance that should be construed as anti-stupidity.

What is being passed off as major league baseball simply is not. And proper journalism will prevail, no matter what.

When this silliness ends, when the real players begin playing real games and the rich guys on both sides go back to making their Lexus payments on time and investing, once again, in new polo ponies and racehorses, this paper will cover it in direct proportion to the interest level of our readers. Which, most likely, will be considerable, after a short period of collective sulking.

Or if replacement ball captures the public’s imagination, as well as the public’s ticket-buying disposable income again, if TV ratings of replacement games are significant, then we’ll reconsider. In any event, we will cover baseball in direct proportion to the interest level of our readers.

But for the moment, we’ll start out being a bit cynical about baseball A.D. 1995--cynicism, of course, being the fourth-most important ingredient of quality journalism, right after accuracy, fairness and distrust.

Oh, yes, and for those of you badly in need of a baseball fix, no matter what the labor situation with the big guys, look for a piece or two on my personal favorite, currently the best professional baseball team in Southern California, the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes.