GOVERNMENT SHOULDN'T PAY FOR NOSTALGIA

Don't get me started on this sentimentality routine. I'll just embarrass myself.

The grizzled newspaperman of tradition stands immune to the heartbreak and tragedy that nourish his livelihood. Too many B-movie journalists assume a tough-guy guise when reciting lines like, "I only cry at weddings," wearing cynicism as a badge of honor. Typical script development proves this sort to be a softy.

Life is hell when it imitates melodrama. I confess to weak moments.

Very often, standing in a stadium waiting for the first pitch to be allowed, I break into full-blown goose bumps listening to the national anthem and the ensuing "play ball."

Were I to ever to stretch during a seventh inning at Wrigley Field and hear Harry Carey warble his rendition of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," it would very likely put me into an unabashed-Kevin-Costner-Field-of-Dreams-misty-eyed-sensitive-man-of-the-'90s melancholy.

And to think some people turn gooey over baby pictures and little puppies.

No logic exists where men and old ballparks are concerned so I'll waste little time reconciling this affection. Were males as concerned with fashion as they are with aging sports venues, there wouldn't be so many ugly ties around.

There are the hackneyed yet probably legitimate links one finds between baseball fields and innocent times. My first trip to a major league park was to the place where the St. Louis Cardinals still play, so the romance there should be leveled by familiarity.

Of course, the grass was real then, and you could get box seats without too much trouble. And the starting pitcher that first game was an unproven lefthander named Steve Carlton.

Just as my life continued after that first game, Carlton also spent his career, moving steadily from rookie hopeful to star southpaw to crafty veteran to washed-up dinosaur. The greatest slap in the face about growing old is that ballplayer heroes of earlier days not only retire, they get paunchy and gray, reminding you in old-timers' games of your own advancing years.

But ballparks stay from generation to the generation and provide you a more comfortable measure. They fall apart some, but people generally see them as they once did rather than how they are.

All of this should make me sort of a natural ally to legislation introduced this week. For some reason, it doesn't.

U.S. Rep. David Bonier requests that Congress live out a bit of nostalgia on its own. (How about recalling the days of balanced budgets?) He wants lawmakers to place four pre-World War II baseball stadiums New York's Yankee Stadium, Boston's Fenway Park, Detroit's Tiger Stadium and Chicago's Wrigley Field in the protective custody of the National Park Service.

Bonier's legislation imposes on the U.S. Department of Interior new authority to buy any of the four stadiums if their owners decide to sell them or tear them down. Also established would be a National Historic Ball Park Acquisition Advisory Commission, a body charged with adding to the system and coming up with ways to use the parks.

Wrigley Field, built in 1914, remains a civic icon in Chicago and any move toward its destruction would instigate community upheaval. The same holds true for Fenway Park, where New Englanders, for no good reason, dote on the Red Sox as if they were kin.

In New York, however, Yankee owner George Steinbrenner has suggested he might want to put his team in a different venue. In Detroit, Tiger officials have talked for years about moving to the suburbs.

I've been to the Bronx and I've been to downtown Detroit. In neither place would I care for a night game to go extra innings. If you can't make a crack deal within two blocks of either stadium, you're dressed like a narc.

Rep. Bonior, who represents a suburban Detroit district, knows this. He should ask his constituents if they would rather spend November Sundays watching the Lions play at Tiger Stadium, the way they used to, or at the indoor facility at Pontiac. Even the hearty souls in Michigan will go for the new facility. The restrooms are clean, the parking is better and there are no steel supports in the sight lines.

Stadiums have become the costume jewelry of cities, with each metropolis putting its civic ego on the line with regard to how it houses its professional sports teams. In St. Louis, sparkling new venues are in the works for accommodating major league hockey, basketball and football franchises. It is not out of place to note St. Louis lacks at this time either a basketball or football franchise.

The facilities, however, will sure look nice.

Sports play an important part in American life, but capturing this part of our culture must have limits. I would like to take my children to see where Stan Musial played, but they are not enormously deprived for not getting the chance.

In Rome, the Coliseum stands centuries after it was a critical part of an empire's existence. America has no bread and circuses in its past ... just long home runs, clutch catches and dramatic moments that live on regardless of a stadium's survival.

Keep in mind this is the view of a man who in recent weeks bemoaned the deterioration of his childhood baseball glove. But preserving my baseball glove doesn't take up a dozen city blocks ... or burden an already strained treasury.

Rep. Bonier is the third-ranking Democrat in the U.S. House. As a taxpayer, I hope he has other things on his mind than putting the upkeep of old ballparks on the public tab.

Sentimentality is a personal matter. I don't want the government paying for my nostalgia.