BASEBALL / ROSS NEWHAN : Grand Old Game Thrives Thanks to Grand New Games

The best way to put it, perhaps, is that the baseball overcame the business.

Despite lingering distaste from the players’ strike, the ridiculously conceived regional telecasts, unsold tickets in some stadiums and the concerns of cynics that introduction of the wild-card team would impair integrity and dilute the championship process, the new playoff process produced a wild week of exciting and dramatic games, helping to invigorate the sport.

“In a year when baseball needs all the positives it can get, what could be more positive than the series we just played?” Seattle Manager Lou Piniella said of his five-game blockbuster with the New York Yankees. “I have never seen better baseball. . . . “

Stan Kasten, president of the Atlanta Braves, expressed amusement at the fallout.

“A few weeks ago, we were all being called the heathens who had destroyed the fabric of the game with wild-card teams and expanded playoffs,” he told reporters covering the division series between the Braves and Colorado Rockies.

“Now the feeling throughout the media is, ‘Imagine this! There’s not enough of these playoffs on TV and the five games should be expanded to seven.’

“It reminds me of the Woody Allen line [in ‘Annie Hall’] about two ladies at a Catskills resort. One says, ‘The food is so awful.’ And the other says, ‘Yeah, and the portions are so small.’

“We’ve obviously come up with something tasty. Maybe our portions are too small. Maybe we have to work on how we deliver it.

“If the primary objections are that the series are too short and not on television enough, that’s good. Everything will be reviewed and the flaws will be corrected.”

Although there is no network television contract beyond the World Series, it has already been announced that every playoff game will be televised nationally next year. It is also possible that the Thursday travel day will be eliminated from the opening round and those four series will start on different days to prevent three-game sweeps that could leave an October weekend without baseball.

Whether five games will be stretched to seven or the format changed in some way to assure home-field advantage for teams with the best records are issues that will be reviewed, acting Commissioner Bud Selig said.

“We’re going to look at the whole package, but there’s a certain pragmatism that can’t be ignored,” he said. “We’re dealing with bigger stadiums, more tickets, tougher hotel and travel considerations than some of the other sports. It would be a logistical nightmare to turn that around in 24 hours. We pretty much have to establish game sites early, but we’ll look at it again.”

In the meantime, Selig said, the TV policy will definitely change--”We didn’t have an alternative to regionalization at the time”--but the new system “otherwise worked out exactly the way we envisioned.”

“I’m impressed with the results,” Selig said. “Everybody predicted that Cleveland, Cincinnati and Atlanta were the teams to beat, and there they are.”

Purists will still rip holes in the process, arguing that a division champion should not have to play a second-place team it beat up on during a 162-game season, that the schedule now puts too much stress on pitching, but it would be hard for any baseball historian to come up with a more exciting week than the one that began on the final day of the regular season, when the Rockies and Yankees clinched wild-card berths and the Angels and Mariners finished in a tie for the American League West title.

It was a week in which:

--Randy Johnson, in a bravado performance, pitched the Mariners to the division crown in a one-game playoff with the Angels.

--Cleveland and Boston played 13 extraordinary innings, only to have the Yankees and Mariners play 15 the next night.

--Johnson came back on three days’ rest and beat the Yankees, while the Rockies blew their third consecutive ninth-inning lead or tie to the Braves but kept the series alive by winning in the 10th.

--The Mariners rallied repeatedly in Games 4 and 5 to beat the Yankees in the madhouse that was once the Kingdome, with Johnson and Jack McDowell back on the mound for the final innings of a final game that is likely to be remembered as one of October’s all-time best, division series or not.

And when they were over, when each of these first-round series had been completed, some of the winners celebrated with champagne, some kept a cork on their emotions. All expressed relief to have survived.

“The pressure has become enormous,” Atlanta Manager Bobby Cox said. “You have to win four times now to be [World Series] champion.

“You have to win your division [title, or a wild-card berth], a division series, a league championship and the World Series. It’s going to make it tougher and tougher to have a dynasty of any sort in baseball, and I think with more expansion you’re going to see even more teams in the playoffs. The pressure keeps growing.”

In the first week of the new playoffs, so did the excitement.