Certain baseball games epitomize futility. Like that game in the Astrodome yesterday, Atlanta v. Houston. Who really cares who wins that game? The Braves don't; they're twelve games back. Houston certainly doesn't; the Astros are seven more games back than the Braves.

It is so typical of a season that goes on for nine months of the year. Inevitably somebody will be left in the cloud of dust that prevails around the league about this time of the year.

A few years back, one of those hype artists that linked himself to the great cause of Astroturf dubbed this particular period of sports as the Overlap season. Nowhere does this sports epithet come in more handy than at one of those tailend games when the voice of Phil Rizzutto, By Saam or Jack Brickhouse mysteriously fades into the voice of Don Meredith, Frank Gifford, or Pat Summerall. It's that period when opening football games and even pre-season shinny matches crowd out the boxscores or relegate the baseball standings in losing towns' newspapers to the last page of the sports sections.

Even the players feel it. Of course there is the occasional over-the-shoulder glance to the scoreboard by the remaining contenders. But for the most part only the off-season drive to the bargain table keeps players from not showing up at the park at all.

But which is worse: to be so out of it, like both teams in any contest among the hapless ones--the Padres (41 games out, no less), Giants, Astros, Angels, or Braves--or to be a late-season casualty, a "choke", such as the Redlegs, Phillies, or Bosox. One must wonder if it isn't more fun for Angel fans to go to the park with the idea that their team might chop off the grasping fingers of a club trying to maintain a handhold on first place, than to see a squirming team such as Boston, whose only hustle in a night of drudgery might be a dash to the dugout after an undramatic and solemn nine.

And it is so characteristic of a folding team to not even be willing to go through the motions that those teams that never had a chance to fold still execute. When chatter becomes an effort, and every fly ball looks so destined for the fence that it doesn't seem worth it to run back a couple of feet to check--or as in the case of the Bosox yesterday--then the answer as to what type of team is the more interesting to watch becomes obvious.

But if it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, then Boston fans should be enamored at the terminal play of their dear gagging Red Sox.