Is It Baseball, Or Just A Farce?

A batter without a number on his back swings late at a fastball barely moving 80 mph and can only lift it a few feet in the air. An old scout, sitting alone in a box behind the plate, shakes his head and doesn’t bother to follow the flight of the ball.

No, not even the popups have been major league this year.

Now, following the strangest spring training in history, is there any reason to believe baseball will look any different when opening day arrives in a week?

Instead of watching Cal Ripken catch that popup, will fans see shortstops plop over trying to backpedal? Rather than cheering Tom Glavine’s curveball, will they chuckle when outof-shape lefties lob up lollipops?

“Everybody paints these guys as being so different from the major-leaguers,” Cleveland manager Mike Hargrove said. “But they’ve played the game a long time. They have the same kind of competitiveness, they just can’t execute at the same level and with the same consistency.”

Neither can the umpires, probably. With the big-league umps locked out by owners in a contract dispute, fillins have been hired. They’ve been calling high strikes, too, resulting in shorter games.

Other stats so far from spring training: Home runs are down about 40 percent from last March and errors are up about 20 percent.

Besides, the ball always seems to be bouncing and it never seems to go very far or fast. In fact, Seattle manager Lou Piniella complained that his pitchers were throwing fastballs so slowly that the radar gun couldn’t clock them.

What the attendance will be at new Coors Field in Denver or anywhere else is anyone’s guess. Even with free tickets, some exhibition games drew just a few hundred fans. Florida Marlins owner Wayne Huizenga said he thinks he can bring out 15,000 per night, but other spectators were so disgusted with what they saw this spring that they threw foul balls back on the field.

Then again, maybe Bud Selig and Donald Fehr will settle the strike in the coming days. Or, at least, perhaps they can find a way to delay the beginning of replacement ball.

Otherwise, starting next Sunday night when the New York Mets play at the Marlins on ESPN, the crack of the bat will sound and look like nothing before.

There will be the Toronto Blue Jays, with a replacement manager and a replacement stadium in Dunedin, Fla., forced out of their SkyDome by an Ontario labor law. There will be the Detroit Tigers, without Sparky Anderson, who temporarily left the game he loved. There will be no Baltimore Orioles and, in the horror of horrors for baseball historians, no streak for Ripken.

Taking the place of Tony Gwynn and Paul O’Neill will be last year’s batting champions from the Dutch and Mexican leagues. In place of Greg Maddux and Roger Clemens, there will be a strikeout ace from Italy.

There will be former stars from the Chinese and Taiwanese leagues. Plus, there will be a guy who actually played in a World Series last year - Henry Cotto - although it was Japan’s World Series and he was with the Yomiuri Giants.

There will be Pete Rose and Ted Williams. The son of the hit king, and a career minor leaguer with the same name, that is.

Actually, no one is exactly sure who will take the field. Teams have been secretive in not announcing their 32-man rosters, which will include a daily inactive squad, like the NFL, of seven players.

So that means that 40-year-old Guillermo “Willie” Hernandez, the 1984 A.L. MVP and Cy Young winner, may or may not be pitching for the New York Yankees. Mike Warren, who pitched a no-hitter for Oakland as a rookie a decade ago, may be with Minnesota. Oil Can Boyd and Al Chambers, the No. 1 pick in the 1979 draft, could be playing for the Chicago White Sox, although they open their season in Baltimore, where Orioles owner Peter Angelos plans on forfeiting games rather than using replacements.

There could be 42-year-old Rick Lysander and Cruz, already a grandfather at 39. There will be an actor from the movie “Major League II,” trying to be a real ballplayer, sort of, and some slow-pitch softball players.

There will not, however, be the 48-year-old Borbon for comic relief. Neither will another pitcher who stuck around a camp for a few days after claiming to have played one game for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1982. He didn’t.

And that elderly fan, the one Philadelphia manager Jim Fregosi playfully motioned onto the field, won’t make an appearance, either.

Still, trying to predict who might finish in first place and finally take part in the expanded playoffs is nearly impossible, especially because the regular major-leaguers could come back at any time.

For now, the Los Angeles Dodgers, who mainly used talented minor leaguers from their system in exhibitions, look strong. The Blue Jays, whose roster does not include a single player with major league experience, look weak. The Phillies, with a mix, are somewhere in the middle.

One thing for certain, though. Jeff Stone, who once hit .362 in a partial season for the Phillies and once stole 123 bases in the minors, could bat .400 for Philadelphia in this brand of baseball.

“I’d go right into the Replacement Hall of Fame, I guess,” he said.

Actually, if Stone broke Rogers Hornsby’s modern record of batting .424, or if hefty Matt Stark of the New York Yankees hit 62 home runs and beat Roger Maris’ mark, their records would count.

The Elias Sports Bureau said there’s nothing to prevent replacement records from going in the book, just like marks set during the NFL strike in 1987.

But Ripken’s consecutive-game streak, now at 2,009 and closing in on Lou Gehrig’s mark of 2,130, is a different matter. Officials, players and fans all seem to agree on its importance, and it may ultimately fall to new A.L. president Gene Budig to figure out whether it officially continues.

“I’m not going to decide until I absolutely have to,” Budig said.