IJUST SPENT the better part of the past 16 days covering a four-game World Series. Even for baseball, which moves slowly, this was excessive. But as the accounting department has been fully briefed, there was this earthquake, and they had to repair the stadium, and some freeways, and it took awhile.

Major League Baseball stepped aside for 10 days before resuming play in San Francisco. Taking that much time off was a noble gesture, if not rather presumptive: Suggesting that playing baseball or not playing baseball would alter any course, including the earth's.The earthquake-delayed World Series illustrated yet again a fact of life in the 20th Century: Sports often causes people to act strangely.

Is sports out of step or is everything else? It wasn't that waiting 10 days to resume the Series was right or wrong, it's that so many people attached so much importance to the decision. Some people suggested that the World Series be called off entirely. They said this was because it was a trivial pursuit. But if it was a trivial pursuit, what did it matter?

To a lesser extent, the same thing happened at the last Super Bowl, in Miami, when a downtown race riot turned sports into a kind of designated world conscience. There were suggestions that the Super Bowl be cancelled, in the wake of the calamity.

Why do people get this way about sports? People wonder why I'm not 100 percent gung-ho about the Olympics. I'm all for the Olympics. It's the way the Olympics make people act that I'm not all for.

The Olympics make people act just like they acted during the Earthquake Series. It makes them behave as if something that is fun and games is more important than that.

Go ahead, name the last time, or the first time, you heard a proponent of the Utah Olympics talk in terms of wanting them because it would be fun watching the races, and not because it would A) Improve our world image and B) Boost our economy.

A further problem is that people in sports are not consistent with their social morality.

They'll say it's crass to play a World Series after a tragedy like an earthquake hits the community they're playing in, but they remain oblivious to far larger tragedies, like, to stay specific in San Francisco, the AIDS epidemic.

Not that they shouldn't be oblivious. Baseball has as much in common with AIDS as it does earthquakes, which is to say nothing at all.

Sports, and the people involved with them, tends to get selective about its causes as well. Usually, high media priority influences that selectivity.

South African apartheid, for example, is a high-profile media cause that has won the conscience of sports.

It is considered taboo to play South Africans in anything at all. And yet, it's considered good taste to play nations such as East Germany, the Soviet Union, and any number of South American dictatorships, where across-the-board restrictions of human rights would easily keep South Africa from medaling in that event.

Go figure. I've seen three very large, in terms of general public interest, sporting events in the past year - the Olympics in Seoul, the Super Bowl in Miami, and the Bay Area World Series. Every one turned into a morality play.

The World Series had the earthquake issue, with Pulitzer Prize winning sports writers like Dave Anderson of the New York Times calling for its cancellation. The Super Bowl had the race riots issue. The Seoul Olympics had the anti-Americanism that came as a result of NBC's television coverage of a riot by Koreans in protest of a boxing decision.

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It was amazing how much Koreans cared how their country was being portrayed on the 10 o'clock news in places like Iowa and Texas and Salt Lake City. Places where they'd been put down by Hawkeye Pierce for years on M*A*S*H and hadn't murmured.

But when it came to sports, it was suddenly serious business.

Which is how it was these past two weeks in San Francisco, when the World Series was put on hold and Tony LaRussa, the manager of the Oakland A's, whose club held a 2-0 lead when the earthquake hit, said, "It's making me feel guilty about feeling good."

Sports should be a positive, not a negative. Sports should matter, but it shouldn't matter too much. A lot of people are saying the World Series of '89 put sports in a better perspective. I thought it did just the opposite.

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