By Claudia Wollis

Who is the best-looking guy in baseball? When the Baltimore Orioles came to play Seattle, the matter was put before the supreme judges of player pulchritude: the Mariners' wives. The surprising result: a home-town favorite, Pitcher Rick Honeycutt, placed second to Orioles Pitcher Jim Palmer in a ranking of baseball's top ten hunks. The criteria for the contest were a little unclear, observed Debbie Honeycutt, wife of the runner-up. "We weren't sure whether they wanted it from the neck up, the neck down or both." Palmer modestly admits his ads for Jockey briefs may have given him a below-the-neck edge. Says the 6-ft. 3-in., 194-lb. righthander: "I'm sure the voters have seen more of me."

After taking a telephone call from a well-wisher at the Le Mans race track, he could have said, "That was Mother." But it would not have had quite the same cachet, so Mark Thatcher, 26, announced, "That was the Prime Minister." Midway into the grueling 24-hr, sports car race, young Thatcher, positioned 30th in a field of 34, suffered what he later called "a momentary lapse of concentration" while negotiating an S bend at 80 m.p.h. His Osella skittered crabwise across the track, bumped to a stop against a safety barrier and refused to start. Thatcher, who made his driving debut just one year ago, was unhurt but thoroughly crushed and teary-eyed. The London press was not sympathetic: STOP SNIVELLING, MARK--YOU'RE A BIG BOY NOW, scolded a Daily Express headline. In Britain, one expects a stiff upper lip trom the son of the "Iron Lady."

Blithely pedaling near his summer home on Long Island to pick up the Sunday papers, former New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay had an unexpected run-in with a non-voter. The cyclist, a distinct long shot in his bid to win the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senator, swerved his ten-speed to avoid a charging dog. Too late. The angry dog rammed into the underdog's front wheel and sent Lindsay hurtling over his handle bars. Grounded with a fractured collarbone, he noted wryly: "This is not the kind of break that a candidate hopes for."

To Woody Allen she is "probably the most beautiful woman the world has yet seen." He might have added that Mariel Hemingway, 18, his Manhattan costar, is also a topflight athlete. Even before she began an arduous nine months of training for the part of an Olympics-bound track star in Personal Best, Heming way would spend four to five hours a day at her home in Ketchum, Idaho, swimming, skiing, jogging, riding horses, climbing mountains or tumbling on the family trampoline. To play a pentathlon competitor, she stretched her repertory to include the shot put, high jump, long jump, 200-meter dash and 80-meter hurdles. All this exercise has given the actress some impressive new muscles. She says: "You can see them get larger; they feel stronger. You become real conscious of them, but not in a vain way."

She lost by a hair shade to Bo Derek when the makers of 10 decided to cast a blond. But tawny Tanya Roberts, 25, came up a winner in ABC's marathon search for a new Charlie's Angel, outshining 2,000 other applicants for the role. As Angel Julie Richards, the 5-ft. 7 1/2-in. Bronx-born actress will wear the halo that was stripped from Shelley Hack, who was dropped after one season. Married to Screenwriter Barry Roberts, the former Tanya Leigh earned her wings acting in off-Broadway shows. Her favorite actress? Another auburn beauty named Leigh -- the late great Vivien, who, as the admiring Angel knows, also found her way to celestial stardom by virtue of an epic talent hunt.

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