Los Angeles Times Special Report / Baseball : The World Series Was to Have Started Today, Instead a Labor Dispute Killed it: Clearly We’ve Reached. . . : The End of Innocence : Despite the Strike, a Young Fan Remains Hungry for the Game

Lucy and I took our son Lucas to his first major league baseball game when he was 8 months old. A month later, we took him to his first fancy French restaurant.

Somewhat surprisingly, he attacked the smoked salmon, seafood sausage, potato risotto and creme brulee at Citrus with the unbridled glee of a Michelin inspector gone berserk. Not at all surprisingly, he slept through most of the game at Dodger Stadium.

Lucas was 5 last month, and over the past four years, he has had many more opportunities to sample my two favorite pastimes. He still loves to eat in nice restaurants--and to do most of the more traditional things that little boys like to do--but until The Strike, baseball (and the Dodgers in particular) had become his one true passion.

He could tell you the name and uniform number of almost every player on the Dodger roster, and even though he can’t read, he could also recognize their names in the sports pages.

In the final two or three months before the strike, Lucas’ first words to his mother on waking up every morning were, “Read me the standings.”

He was soon able to recognize the names of most of the teams in both leagues, and over breakfast every day, he would “read” aloud, telling us each team’s record.

“The Expos are the best team,” he said the day before the strike. “I think they’ll play the Yankees in the World Series.”

Recently, Lucas told me he missed baseball “really, really badly.” Then he said, “The strike’s probably not going to be over until I’m dead.”

When I assured him that not even the major league club owners could possibly be stupid enough to let the strike go on that long, he brightened slightly.

“Maybe it’ll be over when I’m 7,” he said.

I hope so. Given the mercurial nature of most kids’ enthusiasm these days, I worry that by the time the greedy morons who run baseball finally agree to settle, Lucas will have moved on to something else, and the unique joy of baseball will forever be lost to him. This is, after all, the era of computers, video games, MTV and VCRs. Everything is speeded up, nothing lasts very long, and there’s no shortage of competition for a young boy’s attention--even if his parents are baseball fans.

I’ve rooted for the Dodgers since their Brooklyn days, and I’ve been a season-ticket holder for more than a decade--although I only go to 15 or 20 games a year. Lucy, a native New Yorker, has been a Met fan since she began taking her younger brother to Shea Stadium in the mid-1960s.

We didn’t force baseball on Lucas any more than we forced restaurants or anything else on him; we simply made it available. If he wasn’t interested, well, there are plenty of happy, healthy kids out there who don’t know a baseball from a nectarine. But I think baseball offers a child enormous opportunities for learning about the concept of the team and individual sacrifice, about the dividends of practice and hard work, about how to win--and how to lose.

Lucas didn’t learn anything at the first games we took him to, of course, but he did stay for the whole game each time, almost as quiet throughout as the Dodger bats. By 1991, when he was approaching his second birthday, Lucas was old enough to sit in his own seat. Since I have only two season tickets, that meant I took him alone, without Lucy.

We went to four or five games in each of the next three seasons, and he fell in love with the hot dogs and ice cream at Dodger Stadium, their resolute mediocrity notwithstanding. To my amazement, he never wanted to leave before the final out--not even when the Dodgers trailed, 12-2, in the sixth inning once and I wanted to go.

“We haven’t sung the ballgame song yet, dad,” he said.

He wouldn’t leave after the seventh inning stretch and two renditions of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” either, though.

Lucas liked the singing and the spectacle and the food, but he didn’t show any real interest in what was happening on the field until we saw catcher Mike Piazza hit two home runs in one late-season game last year.

That instantly turned him into a Dodger fan and a Piazza fan. He mentioned Piazza often during the off-season and he frequently asked me when it would be April.

“That’s when baseball starts, right, Dad?” he said repeatedly.

We went to six or eight games in the truncated 1994 season--he also went to a Dodger-Met game with Lucy--and Piazza played well every time. After he hit a grand slam in one game, Lucas became even more devoted to the Dodgers--and to Piazza.

When I bought an old set of baseball cards that included Mike Scioscia as the Dodger catcher, Lucas said, “Hey, what’s he doing? Mike Piazza is the Dodgers’ catcher.” When I asked him in a pizza parlor if he wanted to order a “pepperoni Piazza,” he got angry with me for daring to take his favorite player’s name in vain.

Often Lucas would go into the living room and tilt our throw rug so that it represented a baseball diamond. Then he would act out several innings of a game. He would announce each player as he came to bat, pretend to pitch and hit the ball and then run the bases. He went through the entire lineup, in order, then started over.

Every few seconds, he would come running in to give us a virtual play-by-play report--”Dad, dad, Brett Butler just hit an inside-the-park home run.” Since his games tended to be high-scoring affairs--”Mom, mom, the Mets are in trouble--the Dodgers are ahead 18-3 in the second inning”--the reports were often so frequent that Lucy and I had trouble eating, sustaining a conversation or reading.

Lucy and I bought baseball cards for Lucas, and he entertained himself endlessly with them. Almost every day, he asked Lucy or me to pitch to him in our tiny front yard. As with his game on the living room rug, he would pretend to be a different Dodger with each at-bat, proceeding sequentially through the entire batting order. If he forgot for a moment that, say, Eric Karros followed Tim Wallach, he would make us stop until he pulled the right name out of his head.

Like his father, Lucas is not a natural athlete. He swings and misses at most of my very soft, very slow, very straight pitches--even though the last time we played, he kept urging me to “throw me a fork ball, daddy,” “throw me a curve.” But--also like his father--he plays hard, including headfirst slides, with his hand stretched out to touch imaginary bases.

Twice--once as pitcher Tom Candiotti, once as Piazza--Lucas whacked the ball over the short “right field” fence, into the yard of our new neighbors. Proud of his “grand slam home runs,” he insisted on going with me to retrieve the ball. When the neighbors turned out to be pleasant, friendly and interested in baseball themselves--one is a Dodger fan--Lucas asked if we could invite them for Sunday dinner . . . and he then invited them both to his fifth birthday party.

But Lucas isn’t blindly loyal to the Dodgers. He has heard me grumbling periodically about Manager Tom Lasorda, so he immediately blamed him for the strike. I tried to explain that, no, this was one screw-up you couldn’t pin on Lasorda.

I am didactic by nature, and I have tried to rein in those impulses when Lucas and I are at the ball game or simply talking about baseball. I tell him only what he clearly wants to know about the rules and procedures of the game. I don’t want to confuse him or overwhelm him. I don’t want to do anything that could diminish his enthusiasm for what is, after all, a simple game of hit and run and throw.

Lucas quickly grasped the basic rudiments of the game--visiting team bats first, three strikes and you’re out, three outs to an inning, nine innings to a game, the manager can bring in pinch-hitters and relief pitchers. When I asked him what the Dodgers had to do to get to the World Series next year, he said, “Win more games.” When I asked what they had to do win more games, he said, “Get better players.”

But Lucas isn’t ready to take Lasorda’s job--or Fred Claire’s--yet. He doesn’t really understand the double play, the hit and run, tagging up or the infield fly rule. (Come to think of it, maybe he is ready to take Lasorda’s job.)

At each game Lucas went to this season, he asked more questions than the last, and he quickly developed strong opinions.

He thought Roger McDowell, not Todd Worrell, should have been the closer, for example, and he wanted Henry Rodriguez, not Cory Snyder, to play left field. McDowell and Snyder have since been dumped by the Dodgers, but Lucas learned early on about the precarious life of a marginal major leaguer.

In June, he and Lucy and I were having dinner at Primi, a West Side Italian restaurant. He left the table at one point and went to sit at the bar between two men, both watching the Dodgers on TV.

When Lucy went to check on him, she found him lecturing the two men: “That’s Jose Offerman at bat. No. 30. He’s a bum.”

The Dodgers shipped Offerman to the minors the next week.

But Lucas’ baseball education has now been interrupted. The baseball owners might now be doing what I tried so hard not to do: Turn him off baseball.

This is a crucial time for Lucas as a potential, long-term baseball fan. He is at a point in his young life when baseball could capture him forever. Instead, the owners risk alienating him, turning his adoration and devotion into feelings of abandonment, betrayal and resentment.

Sure, he still is young. I didn’t become a baseball fan until I was 9. But Lucas is more precocious--and more mercurial--than I was as a boy, and he has far more alternative forms of entertainment. I’m afraid that the premature end to this season, the loss of the playoff and World Series excitement that could have cemented his enthusiasm--and the possible loss of spring training and part (or all) of the 1995 season--could permanently disrupt his interest in baseball.

He hasn’t expressed any such feelings overtly yet, and Lucy and I tried to keep his interest in baseball engaged by letting him watch parts of the wonderful Ken Burns series on PBS. (Every time that I or narrator John Chancellor described some storied player--Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Joe DiMaggio--as one of the greatest ever, Lucas would shake his head vigorously and say, “No, Mike Piazza’s better, right, dad?”)

Unfortunately, this devotion did not seem to extend much beyond television, and for the moment, he seems more eager to play soccer than baseball.

Before the strike, I had been thinking that when his birthday came, I might take Lucas and several friends to Dodger Stadium. Instead, we had 16 of his friends to the house for a party and magic show. In addition to the predictable assortment of “Lion King” and “Power Ranger” toys and games, gifts from his friends included--among other things--a Dodger T-shirt, a Dodger warm-up jacket, an abridged, “25 Great Moments” book version of the Ken Burns “Baseball” series and a book called “If I were a Los Angeles Dodger.”

In the latter, a photo of Lucas appears, in a Dodger uniform, at various moments during a critical Dodger-Giant game. The series of photos climaxes with “Lucas” hitting a home run to win the Western Division championship.

On his actual birthday, I told Lucas that in keeping with a family tradition, he could choose any restaurant in town for dinner. He chose Primi. The owner and his wife and their two young sons are friends, and they all showed up to wish Lucas a happy birthday. Lucas had a great time playing with the two boys between bites of his Caesar salad, veal T-bone steak and more desserts than you could wave a fungo bat at. But when I asked him if he would rather be at Primi or Dodger Stadium, he answered, unhesitatingly, “Dodger Stadium.”

Maybe all is not lost. Yet.

Early the next morning, I signed him up for T-ball one afternoon a week at his new school.