Save Our Edgar! Change The Rules!

In the fearsome clash of intellects that will ignite the baseball owners’ meetings this week in Atlanta, not a single spark will land upon realigning the major league rules as well as the teams.

Dumb. Breathtakingly dumb.

Forehead-slapping, table-pounding, door-kicking dumb.

The American League, regardless of which teams come and go, will keep the designated hitter. The National League will continue to allow pitchers to hit.

“I don’t see any way that the N.L. goes to the DH,” Bud Selig, commissioner without epaulets, said in an interview this week. Will the DH be dumped? “Not at the moment,” said proud-to-be-your-Dud.

For Seattle baseball fans, that means once some form of realignment is adopted, Edgar Martinez will likely be in his last few games as a Mariner.

Any realignment plan under discussion has the Mariners moving to the N.L. The future of Martinez, 35 in January, is in the A.L., because he’s simply not a good enough fielder to chance him in a regular position.

Even a full spring training at first base will bring him nowhere close to Paul Sorrento, whose underrated, superb glovework this year has kept the Mariners infield from being an even more epic butcher shop than it already has been.

Although Sorrento is a free agent after this season, Martinez isn’t an adequate replacement. His vulnerability to injury alone could cost the Mariners the key man in the lineup that allows Ken Griffey Jr. to see an occasional fastball while avoiding about 200 intentional walks a season.

Unfortunately, Mariners management has been among the advocates of realignment. It is willing to sacrifice Martinez as well as 21 years of building an organization to A.L. specs in order to get better TV times and save some travel time and money. For a team that sacrificed Jose Cruz Jr. to the win-now idea, the sudden appearance of a long-term view is just a tad contradictory.

Recently, I offered up a grudging endorsement of the idea of realignment, not for economic reasons but because it would eventually enhance competition through better scheduling and more significant games, not to mention aiding fan convenience with better starting times. The sacrifice of some tradition would be worth it if the game were improved.

But improvement had to include eliminating rules distinctions between the leagues, particularly with the advent of interleague play. And since every baseball organization in the world outside of the N.L. has adopted the DH, it seemed only reasonable that the N.L. be compelled to join the 20th century before it expired.

Instead, the owners, by all accounts, will continue to indulge separate rules in the same game. Can you imagine the one NFL conference playing on a 90-yard field, the other on a 100-yard field? Perhaps the NBA’s Eastern Conference teams could be given eight fouls per player, since they foul more anyway, and the NBA’s Western teams could be given 30 seconds to shoot, since they’re better at it.

The main reason the owners will maintain two sets of rules is to avoid another losing fight with the players union. Abolition of the DH would mean a loss of 14 highly paid jobs. Union chief Don Fehr has said that will happen only over his lifeless, humorless and considerable body.

Although that thought has some macabre appeal, Fehr’s resistance and his union’s history of success virtually killed the notion of abandoning the DH. But getting both leagues to accept the DH has been equally unlikely, because some N.L. owners are standing firm on tradition. Of all things.

Apparently, it is OK to be protective of some traditions but not others. How that hair is split might seem unclear, unless the cynical posture of following the money is taken: No DH makes for a cheaper payroll. Pitchers in the N.L. hit for free.

So when the Mariners move to the N.L., the new circumstances will force the club to deal Martinez back to the A.L., a prospect he and his teammates deeply resent.

Martinez, signed through 1998 for $3.5 million with the club owning an option for 1999, has indicated he isn’t much interested in signing another deal because his permanent home is Seattle. Even though he could probably hit .300 to age 40 and beyond, Martinez is a homebody who is not a money hound. Pursuing an itinerant career might not be worth it to him.

Even though he is the game’s best DH with high market value, the Mariners aren’t likely to fill the hole he will leave in the lineup and clubhouse. There probably isn’t a more respected and liked figure in the Mariner organization, where he has been a 15-year baseball lifer. And with the Mariners in desperate need of a closer, it’s hard to imagine them acquiring his near-equivalence to bat behind Griffey.

Obviously, teams trade popular, effective players all the time, and baseball life goes on. But the wager is here that a popular, reasonably priced All-Star performer in his prime has never been dealt because of a silly dispute about the rules of the game.

Again, baseball is about to stretch dumbness to a new frontier, where no sport has gone before.