DAVE BARRY ON BASEBALL

"Given a choice," Dave Barry writes, "between catching a fly ball and saving an infant, a woman will choose to save the infant without even considering if men are on base."

Indeed. Here's Dave's quick gloss on the history and meaning of baseball:

THE ORIGINS OF BASEBALL: Mankind has played games involving sticks and balls for hundreds of thousands of years. Meanwhile, Womankind had her hands full raising Childrenkind, but whenever she asked Mankind to lend a hand, he'd answer, ''Not now! We have a no-hitter going!'' That was true, because numbers had not been invented yet.

Then, in 1839, along came a man named Abner Doubleday, who as you can imagine took a lot of ribbing because his name could be rearranged to spell not only ''A Barely Nude Bod'' but also ''Lure Dad By A Bone.'' Nevertheless, he invented a game that included virtually all of the elements of modern-day baseball, including Bob Costas and the song Who Let the Dogs Out. This led to the Civil War.

BASEBALL TODAY: Baseball today is very much the same as it was 150 years ago, except that, for security reasons, the games take place after the public has gone to bed. The rules are simple: Each team sends nine players onto the field, except for one team, which sends one -- the ''batter'' -- plus two elderly retired players called ''coaches,'' who constantly touch themselves on various parts of their bodies to communicate, via Secret Code, the message: ''Tobacco juice has corroded my brain into a lump of dead tissue the size of a grape.''

The object of baseball is for the ''pitcher'' to throw the ''ball'' into the ''strike zone.'' This is almost impossible, because the only person who knows the location of the strike zone is the ''umpire,'' and he refuses to reveal it because of a bitter, decades-old labor dispute between his union and Major League Baseball. On any given day, the strike zone may not even be in the stadium; there's simply no way to tell. The umpire communicates solely by making ambiguous hand gestures and shouting something that sounds like ''HROOOOT!'', which he refuses to explain.

Eventually, the pitcher throws the ball at the batter, in case the strike zone is located somewhere on his body. This is the signal for all the players to run to the middle of the field and engage in a form of combat similar to professional wrestling, except that sometimes professional wrestlers, by accident, actually hit each other. This never happens in baseball, where the last player to land a punch was Babe Ruth, who in the 1921 World Series, knocked out his own self. Instead of punching, baseball players fight by grabbing each other's shirts and exchanging fierce glares, as if to say: ''You're gonna get a PERMANENT WRINKLE IN YOUR PAJAMAS, BUSTER!''

After nine ''innings'' of this, the team with the most ''runs'' wins. I don't know how the runs happen, because by then I'm asleep. But I sleep in front of the TV, in a rooting position. My body language clearly says: ''I may not know who's playing, but if they don't win, it's a shame.''