It All Begins On Opening Day : Millionaire Boys Club : PLAY BALL: The Life and Troubled Times of Major League Baseball: By John Feinstein : (Villard Books: $22.50; 427 pp.)

I’m a Giant fan. Have been all my life. Which is more than somewhat. The Polo Grounds. Chinese home runs. Parking on the old Speedway for free (except for a quarter for the kid who offered to watch your car--”so you don’t get your tires slashed.” Nice kid.)

There were fans then. You grew up with your team. They weren’t going anywhere. Neither were you.

King Carl Hubbell and Prince Hal Schumacher. Mel Ott in right field digging “victory gardens” with his spikes, one for left-handed batters, one for righties. Clint Hartung, the Hondo Hurricane, who made the cover of Life but couldn’t solve the slider.

You were loyal then, and you felt that the players were loyal too. (Not many were, of course, but you thought they were, which was what counted.) Crazy Danny Gardella who knocked himself out chinning on the dugout roof. Toothpick Jones, Giddyap Napoleon Reyes. And for one shining hour, Clyde Kluttz (!).

It was a symbiotic coupling. A homey thing. Our guys. Bobby Thomson, who dated my sister (so did Ralph Branca; go figure). Monte Irvin, Rube Gomez, Daddy Wags, the all-Alou outfield. Johnny Rucker. Dusty Rhodes, who seasonally knocked ‘em back in a tavern in my suburban hometown and belched his mantra: “What I like best is hittin’ the bejesus outta that ball.”

And Willie Mays, the best there ever was, who spanned the chasm between Coogan’s Bluff and Candlestick; and Bobby Bonds, a superb athlete (ath-a-leet) who couldn’t quite fill Willie’s shoes. (Who could?).

And now they’re asking me to root for Barry Bonds.

On the surface, it’s a natural. Not only is Barry the son of Bobby, he’s also Willie’s godson. Twice MVP at 28. And a Big Bopper in the best Giant tradition. So what’s wrong with Barry? With the Grand Old Game itself? Let John Feinstein tell it.

In the off season, Bonds left the Pirates for the Giants, for $43,750,000 over six years. Nobody cried. “He didn’t have a close friend among them,” Feinstein reports. The author, putting together a book on the 1992 season, naturally wanted--needed--to talk with baseball’s richest (and possibly best) player.

Beat writers had told sports author Feinstein to be prepared to deal with “a group of selfish, spoiled, arrogant athletes.” Bonds, he discovered, was their avatar: “Bobby Bonds, he of the aforementioned $43.75-million contract, told me he wouldn’t talk to me unless he was paid for the interview. When I told him that reporters don’t pay to talk to news sources, he said, ‘I’m not talking, and if you use my name in the book I’ll sue you.’

“See you in court, Barry.”

For the first time since the Black Sox, then, a pall hangs over a baseball book. To be sure, the individual games retain their charm, their timeless rhythm. Feinstein’s pitch-by-pitch passion play--batter Dave Winfield versus pitcher Charlie Liebrandt, Grizzle versus Guile, in the sixth game of the World Series--rekindles the cockles. Even a peripatetic old mercenary like Winfield is stirred: “It was one little hit, that’s all, but it was the one little hit I’ve waited for all my life.”

The real suspense, though, has shifted beyond the playing field. Who will Liebrandt be pitching for next year, and for how much? (Texas; a lot.) Will Winfield hang ‘em up, or, more likely, switch his allegiance too? (Yes; to Minnesota). What about David Cone? Picked up by Toronto from the Mets on the last day of August, Cone pitched the Blue Jays to a world championship, then signed with Kansas City for even more money. These days they call it a “rental.”

Like moths to a pheromone, the players chase the green. “You want to get excited about your team’s prospects for 1993,” Feinstein writes, “but with all the free agents and switches, you don’t even know who the hell is on your team.”

Cone, “who wanted so much to return to New York, will not--he couldn’t resist a $9-million signing bonus (that’s right, $9 million on the spot for signing his name) offered by the (Kansas City) Royals.” Toronto had to replace him, so for another barrel of money they went for Dave Stewart, born and raised in Oakland, “who resurrected his career (there) and helped resurrect the city after the earthquake of 1989.” This year, Stewart will be pitching against Oakland.

The villains of Feinstein’s piece are nailed early--in the introduction. Fay Vincent, deposed as commissioner for loving the game too much, is at home, watching the ’92 Series. After four innings he switches off the TV. “I tried to watch the game,” he says, “but I couldn’t. Everything seemed to remind me of the owners.”

Increasingly, says Feinstein, fans “do not just see Cal Ripken or Kirby Puckett, they see men making $6 million a year.” Obviously one can’t blame a Barry Bonds, no matter how petulant, for carting off a king’s ransom. One can, however, blame the king for putting a barrel of gold in harm’s way, and the hand of the princess in marriage, too, if that’s what it takes.

In short, the monarchs have gone mad. Lose a key player to another owner willing to pay $5 million? Sign somebody else’s--for $5.1. Payroll too exalted even for you ? Sell off the prime beef, call up the offal and tell the fans you’re “building for the future.” Sometimes it almost works--Cleveland’s total salaries come to $8 million, just a little more than the Giants are paying Bonds alone. More often the fans, not as dumb as we look, respond by staying away, even in an ideal baseball town like San Diego, and in Anaheim, which comes pretty close. Then there are the teams that spend $40 million a year and still stink up the joint. We don’t have to look far.

Happily for baseball, there’s Pittsburgh, a dynasty-in-progress against all odds. Hamstrung by small-market economics, the Pirates, in two years, have lost Bonds, Doug Drabek, Bobby Bonilla, John Smiley--an entire All-Star team--yet they’ve won three division titles in a row while hacking $10 million off their payroll. How? Through loyalty, of all things; by rallying around manager Jim Leyland, best in the business and a throwback to the likes of McGraw, Durocher, Veeck.

“I like the town,” Leyland tells Feinstein. “I like my players. . . . The money I was offered by the Pirates was more than I’ll ever need. Hell, I’ve been poor and didn’t mind it. The day I signed that contract I burst out laughing. . . . I’d do the job for nothing and they’re paying me like a king. Unbelievable.”

Leyland doesn’t resent the defection of his big-buck stars, he just doesn’t understand. Of Bobby Bonilla, who went to the Mets for $29 million, Leyland says, “I’m happy for Bobby that he was able to get the money he got. But all you ever hear from guys is they want to take care of their family. He was offered like $25 or $26 million to play in California. Are you telling me you can’t take care of your family for $25 million? Hell, you can take care of Guam for $25 million.”

This is the theme of “Play Ball,” but there is also more than a little fun in the book. (Remember fun?). There’s the story of John Tudor, no favorite of the writers, who hurt his pitching hand punching out a clubhouse ventilator. For days after, the query circulated: “Where were you when the . . . hit the fan?” There’s the banter prompted by Jose Offerman’s manos de piedra: How do you spell Offerman? O-F-F-E-E-E-E . . .

There’s Boston’s supercompetitive Roger Clemens, who says after another brilliantly pitched game, “My intensity was really intense tonight”--but who also explains why he puts out for every game, even when he hasn’t got his stuff: “What if there’s a guy who’s driven 100 miles to the game with his family and this is the one game they’ll see all year and I go out and I pitch lousy. Is that fair?”

Feinstein discovers that even in the ‘90s, for every Bonds, there’s a Clemens, for every Cone a Puckett, for every Lasorda (“phony”) there’s a Cito Gaston; for every quid a pro: a Tony Pena, Pudge Fisk, Danny Tartabull, Nolan Ryan . . .

Ordinarily one ends a review of a baseball book on the upbeat. That’s just the way it is, the way it should be. This year it’s different. Feinstein, who wants to believe, just shrugs. Superfan Fay Vincent, ex-commish, maybe says it for all of us: “A bunch of cheap billionaires taking on a group of whiny millionaires.”

Barryt Bonds? Give us a break.

*

P.S. In the galley proof of “Play Ball,” our estimable local nine is referred to as “the Lost Angeles Dodgers.” A typographical error. It is, isn’t it?