Edition: U.S. / Global

SPORTS OF THE TIMES; Build a Better Ball Park, and the World . . .

Published: August 20, 1989

No, Donald, we said buy the Yankees.

Why would you want to get involved with another rogue sports league, anyway? At least the United States Football League gave you national exposure. At first, you were the man who hired Doug Flutie. Within a few months, Doug Flutie became the quarterback who worked for you.

But now you're a world celebrity. Your name in glitz all over Manhattan. Magazine covers. Autobiography. A board game named after you. A bicycle race through the Northeast. Gambling dens alongside the desperate slums of Atlantic City. And somebody swore he drove by LaGuardia Airport the other day and saw airplanes with your name on them, although he may have been hallucinating on that one.

Now you are claiming the New Jersey franchise in what will inevitably become known as the Trump League. Surely you know there are not enough players to go around.

The talent gap is the reason baseball owners are dragging their feet on expansion, and is also why they have not trucked in replacements during labor disputes, the way the brazen National Football League owners did.

Even if the Trump League signs a few stars for big money, how will they look against culls and rejects? Mark Langston's eighth no-hitter? Darryl Strawberry's 73d home run?

The fans will know, Donald. It's not like Herschel Walker running wild in the springtime. That sort of looked like football. Running. Passing. Blocking. Tackling. What's the difference? But a rogue baseball league will not look like baseball.

Perhaps this is one of your feints, like the threat you once made to build Brasilia on the west side of Manhattan.

But let's say you are serious. You cannot create talent, but you could gain instant recognition for your league: old-fashioned stadiums. Baseball like it used to be.

Donald, you've seen movies like ''The Natural'' and ''Eight Men Out'' and ''Bull Durham'' and ''Field of Dreams,'' all of them paying respect to the old days, when peaches tasted like peaches and not cardboard, when there were live newsboys instead of sullen vending machines, and when the grass was real.

There is a great nostalgia out there for tradition. The recently built Rich Stadium in Buffalo, where a Triple-A team has drawn more than one million fans for two straight seasons, was designed with the late, lamented Ebbets Field in mind. It has no dome, which was a brave statement in Buffalo, and it has a grass field, and a traditional baseball configuration rather than the oval multipurpose chafing dishes of the past generation.

Donald, you might be tempted to build a gaudy high-tech temple like the Skydome recently opened in Toronto, complete with retractable roof, hotel and the obligatory local branch of the Hard Rock Cafe.

But you might want to consider what Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic of The New York Times, recently wrote: ''The problem here is not in the design itself, but in the nature of any indoor stadium, even one that can open itself to the sky. Toronto has one of the most spectacular new structures in the world. What it does not have, alas, is a baseball field.''

The key word is ''field.'' Baseball's strength is its timelessness, its appearance of a rural sport that endures in modern times.

Check out a tape of the Yankee game in Milwaukee last Wednesday afternoon, played in bright sunlight, on green grass. Occasionally, the camera caught shots of the hill behind right field, with buildings and lush trees and real life going on. The Yankees in their classic road gray, and the Brewers in their vivid blue trim, formed a new painting every time the ball was in motion. The game was an art form.

One prerequisite for any stadium in the Trump League should be integration into the surroundings. Like Wrigley Field with its apartment buildings behind the bleachers. Like Fenway Park with downtown glittering behind right field. Even like Shea Stadium, gussied up in recent years but retaining its view of workaday Queens behind the outfield.

These are ball parks, not multipurpose retractable-roof monsters that can accommodate a football game one day, a Final Four another weekend, the Grateful Dead one night and a tractor pull the next night. Even with the inconvenience of an occasional rainout, these ball parks are monuments to the National Pastime.

You can't put Robert Redford and Kevin Costner at every position, and it may not be practical to use baggy old uniforms and stumpy old gloves, but at least get the ball parks right:

In New Jersey, keep the east end of the park open, with a view of the New York skyline. Put in grass and play at least half the games during the day. Factor some irregularity into the dimensions, to make each field unique: A high wall in left field, with home runs plopping into one of New Jersey's chemical swamps with an ominous sizzle. A coffin corner in another park. Tangles of ivy. Scoreboards that produce erratic caroms. Embankments deep in the outfield, like in old Crosley Field. Character.

There's not a way in the world you can buy enough major league baseball talent, Donald, but you're a builder. Forget Flutie and Walker. Make the ball park the star.

Oh, yes. And if anybody tries to sell you an aluminum bat, use it on him.