Babe

The puffball reliever will lay the juiced ball on a tee. The padded hitter will use his bloated biceps to smash it deep into the stands. Every headline will weep. Barry Bonds passes Babe Ruth. He does not. He will not. Saying Barry Bonds passes Babe Ruth is like saying the Escalade passes the Mustang. It's like saying text messages pass handwritten letters. It's like saying Zima passes beer. When Bonds hits homers No.

Julia Ruth Stevens sits in her favorite chair in her tiny, pale pink living room and happily shares details about more than a dozen pictures of her famous father hanging on every wall. Lately, Stevens hears his name -- she simply refers to Babe Ruth as "Daddy" -- mentioned almost daily on the news, now that San Francisco slugger Barry Bonds is closing in on Ruth's home run mark. "It doesn't matter what the record is, I don't think there is anybody who is going to take Daddy's place," she said.

Where else can a guy have an affair with a hot TV news babe, leave his wife and three kids over it, let it all affect his job to the point where he tells his boss he can't go on (granted, it's really hard to play baseball for millions of dollars anyway), and then have a reporter portray him as not only a victim, but a hero as well? Is this a great country, or what? RICHARD GRYEBET Glendale

Bob Dylan is probably not the first composer who comes to mind when you think of musical theater. In fact, he may be the last. Yet the songwriter who once epitomized '60s counterculture seems bound for Broadway. Problem is, while his music may be seducing a mainstream audience that once anxiously resisted it, the jukebox bandwagon it's traveling on hasn't yet figured out what theatrical direction to head in.

Golf stars Mildred "Babe" Didrikson Zaharias and Patty Berg whipped duffers Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in a scratch game in the Frank Condon Tournament at the San Gabriel Country Club. At the sixth tee, Zaharias hit a ball that whacked a diamond ring worn by a female spectator. The stone tumbled out of the ring, the ball rolled onto the green, and Zaharias sank an 8-foot putt. The diamond was found afterward. The Times called the shot a "birdie diamond."

FOR Americans of a certain age, watching TV game shows has to rank as one of the great, vacuous pleasures of the mid-20th century. The golden age of game shows, spearheaded by classics like "Queen for a Day," the notorious "Twenty One" and the subversive "The Groucho Marx Show," perhaps reached its glorious finale with "The Gong Show."

A 16-show run of "Babes in Arms" at Saddleback College's McKinney Theatre that was scheduled through Sunday was cut short, not by stinging reviews but by stinging bees. The bees invaded a recent early matinee, stinging the lead actress and prompting the show's cancellation after three performances. Some cast members joked that the show wasn't meant to be. Others suggested the name of the 1937 Rodgers & Hart musical be changed to "Bees on Arms." But the humor went only so far.

When a man of a certain age says he dreamed of playing centerfield for the New York Yankees, what he really means is that he wanted to be Mickey Mantle. For boys growing up in the 1950s and '60s, Mantle was a mythic, Bunyanesque figure who swatted monumental homers from both sides of the plate with seeming ease and chased down fly balls with the tenacity of a bounty hunter.

Surprisingly for an hour of television that regularly features 115-pound women who are not yet of drinking age wearing outfits made from less than a baseball hat's worth of material, UPN's "America's Next Top Model" may have exactly zero heterosexual male viewers. But, of course, the care, feeding, and brutalizing of models has always been a gay pastime. The franchise's dishy and catty fourth season, the first one shot in L.A.

The Curse of the Bambino is dead, forever submerged in Willis Pond with Babe Ruth's piano, buried with the home run balls of Bucky Dent and Aaron Boone, the funeral procession rolling through Bill Buckner's legs and coming to rest at a grave that took New England 86 years to dig. Long live the Boston Red Sox.