Never Having to Grow Up

By RICHARD CORLISS

It was a perfect day for baseball. Now if only the baseball had been perfect. At McKechnie Field in Bradenton on the Gulf Coast, the midweek weather might have been auditioning for a Florida picture postcard, but the hometown Explorers committed three errors, looked orphaned on the base paths and lost by nine runs. After the game, Wayne Garrett, the former New York Met, who entered the lineup in the eighth inning, was asked if he was exhausted from playing. "No," Garrett sighed, "but I was tired of watching."

Welcome to the Senior Professional Baseball Association, where the crack of the bat meets the creak of the bone. Founded this year by Arizona real estate developer Jim Morley, the S.P.B.A. is into its first three-month season, fielding eight Florida teams of ex-major leaguers 35 or older (catchers may be 32). Most of the superstars are missing: Reggie Jackson is occupied with his classic autos, Jim Palmer with his underwear, Pete Rose with hawking his tarnished name. But enough good ole boys of summer are participating to help ease the winter of discontent every baseball addict endures between the last out of the World Series and the first bud of spring training.

They will also be tapping the deep font of goodwill toward aging sports idols. The American male wants to keep seeing athletes do what they once did best. In golf, the senior circuit earns more money than the entire women's tour. Former tennis aces draw big crowds in their own slots at the major tournaments. Boxing, aside from Mike Tyson's bum-of-the-month festival, is one big Over the Hill Gang. Last week's waltz between Sugar Ray Leonard, 33, and Roberto Duran, 38, was the top-grossing fight in history. Next month George Foreman, now bigger than Mount Rushmore and twice as old, will face perennial white heavyweight Gerry Cooney. Someone will get hurt -- probably the first one who throws a punch -- and people will pay to watch. Like rock 'n' roll, sports used to be a young man's game. But with the graying of America, the Stones go rolling on, and geriatric jocks are big business.

Well, maybe not big Senior Baseball business. The eight S.P.B.A. owners, each of whom staked a reported $850,000 for the first season, are not expecting quick profits. With some games attracting as few as 100 paying customers, a team or two may fold before the scheduled February play-offs. The players, whose salaries average $23,000, won't get rich either. But what they want is to prove, to themselves and others, that there is life after Fan Appreciation Day. "Hell," says ex-Yankee Graig Nettles in the S.P.B.A. yearbook, "if I can stay in baseball, I may never have to grow up." The same goes for the fan, especially at long distance. Just checking S.P.B.A. stats in USA Today keeps the faithful in touch with the game's liturgy. To catch a Senior game on a remote radio signal -- to hear "Bobby Bonds now batting against Rollie Fingers" -- is to be time-warped into any fan's favorite baseball era: Back When.

And to see a game in person is to watch The Natural replayed in super slo- mo, but often only the outtakes. Mopey grounders duck under the gloves of groaning shortstops. The 90 ft. between bases can loom like a C-5A runway when a Senior tries stretching a single into a double -- except that outfielders frequently concede the extra base on elusive fly balls. The players, as considerate of their team's equipment manager as they are of their own vulnerable bodies, rarely dirty their uniforms with stabs at a circus catch or a headfirst steal. They know that those feats of reckless grace are mostly memories.

Age inflicts its cunning humiliations on any sportsman's skills. At times gravity takes its toll too. Though an S.P.B.A. locker room reveals plenty of movie-star musculature, other athletes have surrendered to paunch lines. Wags assert that you can't tell the players from the sportswriters. "A good team from the rookie leagues could beat some of the Seniors," says Jim Brown, a Tougaloo, Miss., college professor and an aficionado of minor league baseball. "These guys don't have the speed or the hunger."

Maybe not, but if enough fans get hungry, it won't matter. Proponents of all-weather, all-age baseball can take heart from the rallying cry of Cy Young winner Vida Blue, now with the St. Lucie Legends: "Hey, the majors will become our minor leagues." Or fans can sit back in the Florida sun and enjoy not the best baseball but a whole lot of it. On that midweek afternoon in Bradenton, the visiting West Palm Beach Tropics put on a big-league display of power and wiles. Mickey Rivers, spark plug of the last Yankee team to win a World Series, slapped six comely hits, though he was hurt and hobbling. Ron Washington, late of the Minnesota Twins, bopped two of the Trops' five home runs. The manager, cranky Dick Williams, chugged onto the field to dispute a close play at first base and informed the umpire, "I'm seein' 'em a helluva lot better than you're callin' 'em."

By the eighth inning the line score looked like bowling frames; West Palm led the Explorers 22-13. Yet the local fans stayed put, stoking their enthusiasm with valiant quips as the game got further out of reach. When it ended, after three hours of ramshackle thrills, someone gaily shouted, "Let's play two!" The Senior Leaguers might not be up to it, but the hot-stove leaguers will never be tired of watching.