The Weeks That Were

Baseball's first two weeks usually fig ure to be a throwaway. But not this year:

> San Francisco's wondrous Willie Mays, the game's highest-paid player (at $105,000), seemed to be bucking for a raise. In nine games, Mays hit seven home runs -- which put him (let's see now) 15 games ahead of Babe Ruth's pace in 1927.

> The Philadelphia Phillies won six out of seven games -- a feat that defied his tory. No other team had lost 100 games a season so many times (14); only the nouveaux Mets and Colts have won fewer pennants (two). It was only three years ago that the Phillies set a record for futility by losing 23 in a row. But now, for the moment, they were lead ing the league.

> The World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers won their opener, and then lost nine out of the next ten. More painful still was the indefinite loss of Star Pitcher Sandy Koufax (25 victories in 1963), who injured a muscle in his pitching arm.

> The New York Yankees, perennial kings of the American League, lost their opener -- with Whitey Ford pitching, no less -- went on to lose the next two games as well. "I'm not worried," insisted Manager Yogi Berra. But he should have been. Baseball's numerologists came up with the fascinating information that the Yankees, winners of 28 pennants, have never won in a year that ended with a four.

>The Kansas City Athletics have trouble hitting a ball out of the infield, let alone over a fence. Owner Charles Finley's solution was to bring the mountain to Mohammed. He built a plywood fence in rightfield, only 296 ft. from home plate, christened the project his "Pennant Porch." Unh-unh, said Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick, so Finley moved the whole contraption back 29 ft. and renamed it a "One-Half Pennant Porch."

> Ken Johnson of the Houston Colts did what every pitcher dreams of: he threw a no-hitter against the Cincinnati Reds. Only trouble was, he lost the game, 1-0, on two ninth-inning errors, one of which he committed himself. Now those were the weeks that were.

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