BEST OF JIM MURRAY / PERSONAL

* On his favorite things: “I like country roads and moonlight, homemade fudge and ocean sunsets.

“I like Christmas carols and Easter parades, jelly beans and black-eyed peas. . . .

“I like to look down on a field of green and white, a summertime land of Oz, a place to dream. I’ve never been unhappy in a ballpark.

“I like to look down and see the same geometry my grandfather saw. I hate change.

“I like one o’cat in the sandlots, bubblegum cards in the schoolyard, batting practice and trade rumors. I even like artificial grass.

“I like baseball. Because it’s always 1910. I like 1910. It was a better time.

“I may grow up some day.

“I hope not.”

* Some of Murray’s laws: * “You can fool all of the people all of the time--if you own the network.”

* “Whatever can go to New York, will. Whatever can’t will go to Philadelphia.”

* On his granddaughter: “I guess it comes to every guy around my age. His youth is slipping away. So is his hair. He says, ‘Eh?’ a lot and always thinks the light’s bad. Then, suddenly, this pretty smile, this well-turned ankle shows up in his life, and he’s 20 again.

“That’s what happened to me. I never saw such little hands and feet and ears in my life. Well, maybe once before. Her mother had them too. . . . Besides, I walked her mother and grandmother down the aisle.

“Whaddaya mean saying that, you old goat, why, you’re old enough to be her grandfather? I am her grandfather!

“Ladies and gentlemen, meet Danica Erin Skeoch (pronounced ‘Skee-oh’), the only person who has come between me and “Monday Night Football.” I mean, I will even turn off the Rams to take her for a stroll. I’d rather watch her than Bo Derek. Or Lynn Swann.

“This was our first Christmas together, and we’ve got a lot to do. This year it was the fur coat and muff but, next year, it might be a basketball or the autobiography of Ty Cobb. She’s getting old. She’s almost 1.”

* On moving from Malibu: “This Christmas morning, for the first time in 18 years, I walk out my front door and an old friend is no longer there. My ocean.

“I have abandoned my great shining sea for the ease and access of the city. I have left the ramparts for the soft center. I have left my love for my comforts. I have left the sunset land and wild acres for the sedate, the secure.

“I have traded whitecaps for white houses. I shall never be exactly the same person again. . . .

“An ocean is like a person--now stormy, raging, passionate, dangerous, reckless; now spent and placid and resting from its labors of anger. . . .

“To the person who bought my house, I leave more than the land, the bricks, the mountain backdrop to the north and east. I leave a vista where, as far as the eye or the glass can see, there is nothing between you and Japan but a few seal-covered islands. . . .

“I will envy you when I hear rain falling on pavement, and I know you are watching my storm come in--long gray veils of rain sweeping in from the tossing sea, leaving the temples of the mountains with the hoar of mist, what the poet calls the ‘compassionate sweet laughter of the rain, the gray-eyed daughters of the mist above the flawed and driven tide.’

“Then, and not only then, but mostly then, will I miss my lovely, lost land, my sunset, my ocean, my 18 Christmases by the side of my beloved sea.”