NEW YORK -- "Ownership's position is that the games would count," the man in the ticket office told me. He was referring to baseball's planned use of replacement players in regular season games, to start on April 2, in an attempt to defeat the players' strike.


And I read union representative Gene Orza's declaration, "You can take it to the bank that scab games will not count in the standings once this strike is settled."


Ramon Caraballo of the Bronx played a bit in the Mexican League. He knows one kind of baseball from another. But for the first time he will be able to take his whole family to Yankee Stadium, because of replacement prices.


And Peter Tannenbaum represents a whole lot of fans who don't know what to think. The needs of the fans never were part of the equation.


"It's hard for me to express the stupidity I see from guys who are brilliant in other businesses," a baseball insider said recently.


"They want to crow, 'We beat them' about the players. It's such a stupid marketing thing, especially when the game itself has taken such a beating. They should have been selling players as heroes for years."


Suppose the season opens as scheduled with "scab" games and the games count, as ownership vows.


And suppose that after about 40 games the strike is settled. Suppose the team playing as the Yankees has a record of 7-33 and is 20 games behind. What then?


Are the Mattingly-Boggs Yankees then doomed to spend the remaining 122 ticket-selling games in an exercise in futility, chasing the Red Sox, who began at 27-13?


Do Boston fans chant, "Our scabs are better than your scabs?"


So what do the Peter Tannenbaums do? He has held season tickets to the Mets long enough to have advanced to a good location.


The Mets have announced that they will even refund tickets -- one homestand at a time -- and preserve locations.


The Yankees are offering a full rebate on season tickets up to April 30, but they don't promise to hold locations.


"I might go to a replacement game on a nice Sunday afternoon," Tannenbaum said. "But I don't want them to count; of course not."


Suppose they un-play this thing out all summer, as Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf threatens. Would we then have a 40-year-old rookie of the year? Would the best pitcher win the Cy Old Award? Would they give him a used car?


But suppose the decision is made through whatever process that the 40 replacement games each team has played don't count. Wouldn't that make the teams guilty of fraud, advertising and promoting the games as championship games and then saying they didn't count?


"I don't expect the owners to get smarter," the baseball insider said. "Expansion now was stupid. It proves the players are more right than the owners. When people stand on line to pay $150 million for start-up rights, how can you say business is failing?"


He thinks players eventually will press the union to go back to work because player skills depreciate every day and owners are owners forever. He thinks the players will move on arbitration. I think it will evolve in the courts, with the owners facing another jolt like $280 million in collusion.


How about a variation of the hockey settlement, by which a team could walk away from one arbitration award every year? Instead of forcing a team to pay a player they think isn't worth it, let him have the marketplace.


"Reinsdorf wants to break the union when they need a union," Insider said. "Imagine the problem if a team has to negotiate the details of 40 separate contracts? What the owners should do is pick up the offer and announce the players have won. Unions need to think they've won. Instead, the owners want to show they have the biggest horns."


In the meantime, Opening Day is beginning to look more like Doomsday.