EW YORK -- Over the last hundred years, much has changed about baseball. But not all that much. Dugouts are still full of chiselers, weasels and other mice studying to be rats. The 1890s gave us John McGraw. Now we have Albert Belle.


McGraw's gang of Baltimore Orioles was said to breakfast on gunpowder and warm blood. They hid balls in tall outfield grass to be retrieved should an opponent have extra bases in mind. Oriole fans were given mirrors to bounce sunlight against an infielder's eyes. Any runner tagging up at third would be delayed by McGraw's hand on his belt.


John Heydler, the National League president, said that McGraw "uses every low and contemptible method that his erratic brain can conceive to win a play by a dirty trick." No surprise there because most baseball players were low and contemptible men -- by the public's reckoning, anyway.


Connie Mack wrote, "There is no use in blinking at the fact that at the time the game was thought, by solid respectable people, to be only one degree above grand larceny, arson and mayhem, and those who engaged in it were beneath the notice of decent society." Though Mack later came to be a starched-collar pillar of rectitude in a half-century as manager of the Philadelphia Athletics, he did have larcenous moments as a young catcher for Pittsburgh in the 1890s. One came the day he discovered that the Pirates' front office contained an icebox. He stuffed balls into the icebox, freezing them overnight. Dead balls, indeed.


Anyway, 85 years after the National League president mused aloud about John McGraw's erratic brainwork, we find the American League president considering the brainwaves of Albert Belle. Belle stands accused of using an illegal bat, its barrel drilled and the cavity filled with cork. All the carpentry makes no sense. First, scientists repeatedly have proved that corking a bat does not increase the distance the bat will drive a ball. Second, Belle is the kind of strong once articulated by Muhammad Ali: "Joe Frazier, he's soooo strong he scares Ban Roll-On."


Yet the Cleveland star seems to have put at risk a glorious season by (1) thinking he needed to cork a bat, (2) using the illegal bat, (3) sending a cat burglar to retrieve it from confiscatory umpires, and (4) getting caught.


Baseball officials and fans are so fascinated by the well-designed larceny that sometimes, even when the larcenist confesses to his crimes, he is regarded with affection and given the respect due a physicist who has determined the gravitational pull of Jupiter's moons.


That bemused tolerance helped Gaylord Perry slide into the Hall of Fame. At retirement in 1983, Perry had won 314 games throwing mostly pitches that had been illegal since 1920. Perry even committed a book called "Me and the Spitter" in which he appraised various jellies and ointments.


Yet Perry was caught in the act so few times that the interruptions became entertainments themselves -- with umpires searching for Perry's goo while the pitcher wore the smile of a magician who has made an elephant disappear. Had baseball been serious about eliminating Perry's spitter, a dozen consecutive ejections based on an umpire's judgment would have done the trick.


But no. Baseball, like the real world, admires chicanery done stylishly.


So we get the pitcher Don Sutton posing for photographs wearing a carpenter's belt heavy with the tools a miscreant might use to scuff a ball. The great hitter George Sisler added hardness to bats by spiking the barrels with phonograph needles; Ted Kluszewski hammered in 10-penny nails. The New York Giants' spy in the Polo Grounds scoreboard moved a venetian blind to signal fast ball or curve. George Brett got away with pine-tarred bats until it suited Billy Martin to call him on it, Martin being a rat descended from John McGraw by way of Casey Stengel.


Now comes Albert Belle, only the latest hitter to believe he is helped by filling a hollow space in a bat barrel with cork. The carpentry does make the bat lighter while retaining the size of choice; but the increase in bat speed is offset by the lighter hitting mass -- a tradeoff at best. Yale University physicist Robert K. Adair declares that a corked bat will "probably not drive the fastball as far by 2 or 3 feet."


So the value in corked bats may be psychological. If the player thinks it works, it works.