Forget the World Series. Baseball fans don't care about that. Forget too about winning records and promising, young teams. They only have to do with today. Who cares about today? The baseball fan knows only one thing counts: yesterday.

If only you could see a game in which the key players weren't will Clark or Jose Canseco but Hank Aaron and Mickey Mantle. If only you could have witnessed Don Larsen's perfect game or watched Ted William's perfect swing. If only you could have seen a game at Ebbets Field or eaten a pretzel that wasn't cold. If only...

It was all so much better then. So much more honest. So much more exciting. Scandals never occurred. Great players never got traded. Solid managers never got fired. Back then, the players had heart and the game had integrity.

Once--that is, anytime practically pre-1989--baseball was in its golden age. Remember 1988. Remember 1977. Great series like those will never occur again. Baseball's in decline. My favorite team's glory is over.

If we were once in a golden age, now we're in an iron age, a dark age. McDonald's at baseball games. Domes. Pete Rose. Revolving players. No longer Rice for Boston. No longer Carter for the Mets. No continunity. Who are these players?

Perhaps, the dark age is too positive. Perhaps, we're in the great abyss. The wastelands of baseball surround us on every side and attack us at all corners. Sure, April's a cruel month, but what about the rest of spring and summer. Just ask anyone who follows the Yankees.

The baseball fan of today has become a self-contained contradiction. He has evolved into an historian of the past and a critic of the present, clutching to the past tighter than Bo grips a bat. For the baseball fan, the past is perfect, and the present and future serve only as horrific reminders of decay.

The myths of yesterday haunt every baseball game today. The Cubs, we all knew, never really had a shot at the pennant this year--not because Clark or Kevin Mitchell overwhelmed the young team. No, Don Zimmer was simply leading his team to its tragic, but, alas, inevitable fate. And in 1986, the Red Sox were just fulfilling their destiny. Bill Buckner isn't to blame; he fell victim to Boston's most powerful force--THE JINX.

The past--not the commisioner, not free agents, and not the owners--rules baseball. This way, baseball's best traditions can flourish. Defeatism. Self-deprecation. It's all part of what makes baseball the great American game.

In its truest sense, baseball appeals to each of us in our desire to go home, to have a past that we can be secure in. Baseball fans, though, don't just want to return home; they want to suffocate it.

If baseball's past was grander, it is only because we don't remember it. Babe Ruth was traded. The Black Sox scandal was not fiction. And the Red Sox and Cubs have come closer to championships than a lot of other teams.

If only the Cubs would have won, so we didn't have to go home again.