This is probably been explained somewhere, but I missed it. Why are so many players batting in helmets that appear to have been scorched or other wise grubbed up in a way that usually renders invisible the team logo? This was expecially noticable with the Red Sox last year, but one sees it all the time now. It's not the helmets are all old, because some players have essentially pristine headgear.

Perhaps the audience would be larger if the games did not run so late. The East Coast start time is 8:30, which means that game of average length will run past 11:30, and if there's a lot of hitting and a parade of relief pitchers, well after midnight. Last night's Longest Series Game Ever ran over five hours.

A generation ago,when there were best of five playoffs, mostly played in daylight, the fans weren't required to spend the whole month of October staying up past midnight every night. The extension of the playoffs into another best out seven round -- mostly played at night -- leaves even the hardiest fan near exhaustion by the time the Series rolls around.

There isn't an immediate cure for this, but there seems to be no reason for the games to start 8:30. The "coverage" begins at 8:00, but the next half hours is deovoted to falderoll and speculation about what will happen once the game starts. Why not move that back to 7:30 and start the games at 8 pm? Or better still, go with the teams themselves and move the start times back to 7 pm, EDT. Both Yankees and Mets have strong television ratings with early starts, and only occassionally do the games go past 11.

The problem seems to be with the local network affiliates, who prefer to run Jeopardy and Seinfeld between 7 and 8, but a big event like the World Series ought to be able to bump routine game shows and re-runs for a week.

Admittedly, this poses problems for the rest of country, but the low ratings seem to indicate that the late starts aren't helping much. Most of the US population lives in the Eastern and Central time zones. There is no good solution to the problem, but an earlier start may be the least bad.

Your column touched on an interesting theme for a future column -- manufacturer aesthetics -- or what makes the Boeing "look." I first came across this notion years ago, when friends at Grumman told me that one reason the company hated the F-111 was that it did not have the Grumman "look." This look had been sustained from the F3F biplane fighter, through the WWII Wildcats and Hellcats, the Panther and Couger jet fighters, and the Intruder bomber, all the way up to the F-14.

The F-111, designed with (and mostly by) General Dynamics was clearly not a Grumman plane.

The Douglas airliners, from the DC-3 through the jet powered DC-8, also had a certain company look. Even without seeing the three tail fins, no one would mistake a Constellation for a DC-6. Once the Boeing planes got into the jet era (the first major Boeing airliners were derived from the B-17 and B-29 airframes and don't really count), they seem to have adopted a Boeing look as well.

I wonder how many of the vehicle accidents that killed people were in fact combat-related? Drivers will veer out of the line of fire as a defense mechanism, and it would be a real stretch to compare that to, say, falling asleep at the wheel in a convoy. There have been a remarkable number of incidents of vehicles being driven into canals and rivers in Iraq, which is not all that easy to do. On Long Island, which has far more cars than our forces in Iraq and probably a greater mileage of docks, breakwaters and bridges than Iraq, when someone drives a car off a dock or bridge, its actually newsworthy, epecially if they are killed.

Secondly, combat operations, even when the enemy is not contacted, are dangerous. Everyone has live ammunition and explosives, and mistakes can be lethal. On D-Day, about 180 British paratroopers (about ten planeloads) are known to have jumped from their planes and disappeared forever. It is believed that they came down in the English Channel and drowned (not much chance of survival in deep water laden down with 50 pounds of kit). They died because the plan called for a night drop just inland from the coast, something that would not be done in quite the same way in an exercise. Combat is different.

At least one compliation of the great baseball teams lists the 1969 Baltimore Orioles, who won 109 games in the regular season, swept the NL playoffs, and then lost 4 games to one to the New York Mets.

In the commentary about the Olypmics television ratings, few have suggested that moving the Olypics to an "every two years" event was a mistake. Part of the Olympic mystique came from the fact that it wasn't a routine or annual event. By switching to every two years, the Olympics debased their own currency. The Olympics used to be something you geared up to watch every four years; now they come every two years. Making them more frequently accessible, presumably in the hope of boosting television audiences, has had the opposite effect. It's abolished the very thing that made them special.

Baseball made the same mistake with the World Series. Moving all the games to prime time made for a bigger audience and a smaller event. Everything from the stock exchange to the nation's classrooms slowed down for the Series. Stock trading fell way off and kids smuggled radios into the schools to follow the game, with recesses dominated by discussion of the latest home run or big strike out. Even though it came every year, it was genuine national event. Now it's just another prime time televsion show -- and one that runs too late.

The Olympics are sharing that fate.