NEWTON'S LAW: BOYS OF MODERN SPRINGTIME AND THE THINGS THAT GO `PING!'

Certain things signal the onset of spring: the blustery day, the sudden budding of flowers, the unexpected warmth of sun on your face. Certain words also clue you in: Grapefruit League and salary arbitration.

Boys of summer need their springtime the way their agents need bulging statistics. Baseball is a seasonal religion in Sun Belt states and those who love the sport glory in the rituals of this worship.

Writers flock to balmy sites for a refresher course in cliches about rites of spring, about wily veterans and young phenoms. Long, lazy pop flies are described by sentences that somehow manage to be longer and lazier.

Lest we get misty-eyed over the ceremonies of Florida and Arizona, there are the plaintive moans of disgruntled rich men to sober us. It is a cold wind that slaps working folks awake when we learn that two million dollars is not enough to be paid for a summer in the sun and all the adulation you can swallow.

The horror stories of spoiled big leaguers have become cliche but some quotes from this spring are irresistible.

Barry Bonds of the Pittsburgh Pirates went to the Florida with a chip on his shoulder because his salary was increased since 1990 from $850,000 a year to only $2.3 million a year; he feels underpaid and unappreciated. "I'm so sad all the time," he told a reporter.

Also put upon is Cincinnati Reds pitcher Jack Armstrong, who won exactly one game after the All-Star break last year but was rewarded with a 100 percent salary increase; his 1991 contract is for $215,000 but he walked out of training camp. His comment: "I'd rather make $30,000 on a tuna boat."

Well, the world can always use another tuna fisherman, though I seriously doubt Armstrong will ever suffer the disillusion of a seafarer looking at his take-home pay.

In slow increments, I have given up on major league baseball. That is not the same as giving up on baseball; it remains an invaluable link to the past, to the freedoms of boyhood.

I visited a friend recently and found leaning behind a door a bat he had used in a summer of our youth, a Louisville Slugger with a "4" printed on its knob and a Nelson Fox autograph.

He had been partial to the thick-handled Fox bat and that was the source of considerable conversation in those days, when we'd stop by Sikes Sporting Goods after school and dig through the bin of bats in the back of the store.

We'd snatch up the bats one at a time, test the grips and swing them in a short arc, careful not to damage the nearby displays or alarm members of the Sikes family. The idle boasts about the punishment we'd inflict on a certain pitcher's fastball would be greeted with idle insults about laying the wood down gently after our strikeouts.

While my friend went for the Fox and the equally thick-handled Jackie Robinson model, I preferred bats with thinner handles, the Eddie Matthews or the Carl Yastrzemski. They were about $4.50 a piece in those days and, if you were hitting into some bad luck, you might make one last throughout the summer.

Still, though costly, it was nice to sit in the stands after the early game and tell a late arrival, "I went three-for-four, but broke my bat."

Bats often became a source of dugout discord. If you brought your own bat instead of using one the team supplied, it was etiquette to let other teammates take it to the plate. Inevitably, someone who batted higher than you in the order would foul off an inside fastball and send a lovely crack up the core of your new bat before you even used it. Considerable moping followed.

Too many of these bats broke and eventually economics caught up to all levels of the game. These days, kids who don't make the major leagues might never touch flame-tempered ash. The bats they use are the indestructible aluminum models, the ones that go "ping!" when they touch off a line drive.

Maybe that's what happened to today's young major leaguers, not enough wooden bat bins and too many "ping!s" in their past. Still, it's comforting to know that big-time baseball can't spoil the game itself.