Baseball has been blessed with many good players but few greats. Now another hitter is about to enter baseball's pantheon of heroes: Rodney Cline Carew, the first baseman of the Minnesota Twins and the first player to have a shot at finishing the season at .400 since Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941. Our cover story this week examines the still little-known Panamanian-born player--his consistent ability, his playing style, his personality--as well as the sport's oldtime hitters and the many refinements in the fine art of hitting a baseball.

"Carew is an open, engaging and articulate man who just happens to be the best hitter in the game," says Reporter-Researcher Paul Witteman, who suggested this cover story. Witteman spent last week with Carew--visiting the player and his family in Golden Valley, Minn., traveling with the Twins, and watching seven games in Minneapolis, Chicago and Milwaukee. But it was not all work. When Ted Williams was expected to stop by for a visit, Witteman called Carew on the phone, disguised his voice, and said, "This is Ted Williams. If you bat .400 this year, I'll break every bone in your body." (Carew was not fooled by that pitch, and had a good laugh.)

Witteman and Sportswriter B.J. Phillips, who wrote the story, both belong to TIME'S softball team, which plays in Central Park and so far has been undefeated this year. Phillips is one of the nation's few top-notch woman sportswriters. A baseball devotee since she was little, she used to write fan letters to Willie Mays. "It's hard to explain why you love baseball without sounding like a professor or a 10-year-old kid," says Phillips. "A case can be made for the mental elegance of the game--its beauty, its symmetry, its exquisite timelessness. The other side of the sport is that it's just great fun--it is running free in the sun."

While many Americans will be out at the old ball park this summer, others will be taking to the air on vacations and business trips. In this issue we provide those travelers with an airport guide that rates the ten busiest airports in the U.S., plus four in Europe and six in the Far East, taking into consideration such matters as the number of times planes are delayed, accessibility, parking and general amenities. In addition to reporting from TIME correspondents who use airports frequently, we used files from Correspondent Marion Knox, who flew in and out of each of the U.S. Top Ten for the story. Senior Writer Michael Demarest, who compiled the guide, has touched down at 107 airports during his own travels, including all of the 20 included in this special report.

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