In the Mets’ tiered ticket pricing plan, only Opening Day, the Subway Series and the final regular season game at Shea Stadium cost more than a ticket to any of the three games this week, a series New York swept with a 5-4 walkoff win last night.

While in years past, a sweep of the Braves would have been greeted by some of the season’s most enthusiastic cheers, reaction to Thursday’s win, which dropped the Braves 15 games behind New York, was muted. Even the hatred bestowed upon favored targets like Atlanta third baseman Chipper Jones and manager Bobby Cox was almost good-natured.

The crowd seemed more focused on the out-of-town scoreboard, which updated the back-and-forth of Philadelphia’s 4-3 loss to Washington, than on the demise of the Braves. And even the way the Mets won, on a line drive by Carlos Delgado misplayed by Atlanta left fielder Omar Infante, seemed ripped from the script of the way New York lost games to Atlanta for years.

But it wouldn’t be fair to say the teams have merely switched places in the rivalry. The rivalry is dead. And judging by his postgame reaction, Cox, who often propped his feet up on the desk, smoking a victory cigar, and held forth after wins at Shea Stadium, still can’t make sense of it.

“That’s a double play [if Infante had caught the ball],” Atlanta manager Bobby Cox said to reporters who followed the trail of smoke into his office after Thursday night’s game. “He’d get Wright [doubled off] at second. He lost it in the lights. I can’t fault him. I’ve seen lots of balls get lost in the lights at Shea.”

For years, those balls were nearly all lost by the Mets. Make no mistake about it—Atlanta’s tremendous talent helped the Braves to dominate the National League East, in particular the Mets, for well over a decade. But a lot of things need to go right to win division titles year after year—and for the Braves, they always had against New York.

From 2001-2005, the Braves had a 58-37 record against the Mets, and won five straight division titles as the Mets slipped further and further from contention. Even in New York’s playoff years in 1999 and 2000, the Mets entered the postseason as the wild card, losing the division—and the season series—to Atlanta both years. As far back as 1998, the Mets entered the final weekend needing just one win against the Braves to secure a playoff berth—Atlanta, on its way to the playoffs, swept New York. And nearly every series included a game that New York lost through physical or mental errors, as though they were afraid of Atlanta.

Even New York’s victories against Atlanta were signature wins, not just because of extreme circumstances—such as an 11-8 win in 2000 that included a 10-run eighth inning, or Mike Piazza’s homering in a 3-2 win in New York’s first game after Sept. 11—but in large part because both took place against the Braves.

But just four Mets played for New York the last time Atlanta won the National League East—David Wright, Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran and Aaron Heilman. And as the players who were dominated by Atlanta left town, the Mets have stopped playing like the Braves haunt them.

A former Met, Mike Hampton, made the start for the Braves, and was subjected to as much abuse by the fans as Jones or Cox. (Hampton was one of those spooked Mets—in his one season with New York, he had a 3.14 ERA overall, but a 6.92 mark against Atlanta). Hampton, battling back from numerous injuries, pitched credibly, leaving after six innings with a 4-3 lead. New York’s comeback left him with a no-decision.

“Those things happen to [Hampton] more than just about any pitcher I’ve ever seen,” lamented Cox.

The Mets tied the game in the bottom of the seventh. With two outs, and runners on first and second, Bobby Cox summoned lefty specialist Will Ohman to face Carlos Delgado. Ohman did his job, inducing a soft ground ball towards first base, but the first baseman Martin Prado, a converted middle infielder, threw wide to a late-covering pitcher, allowing a run to score.

“Prado tried to make a good play,” Cox said. “Can’t fault him for that.” But he wore the same perplexed expression.

But Met-killer Chipper Jones came to the plate in the top of the eighth inning of a 4-4 game. For years, fans might have had flashbacks to Jones’s large number of key hits against New York, his .330 average against the Mets in his career. Instead, a cheer went up from the crowd.

Washington had pulled ahead of Philadelphia. And though Jones walked, the Mets escaped the inning unscathed.

Cox was also dismayed by the ball hit by Delgado in the ninth, one which allowed Wright to score the winning run. Still, the collection of bad bounces didn’t strike Cox as an evening of the bounces Atlanta enjoyed during the team’s dominance.

“I don’t think that way at all,” Cox said. “It’s one ball that he lost in the lights, and it cost us a ballgame. It’s a bad throw, and it cost us a ballgame.”

As the reporters filed out of his office, Cox asked one: “Our [Olympic] softball team got beat?” He shook his head in surprise and uttered, “Son of a bitch.”

That’s nothing new, particularly. Atlanta is expected to be successful, having won 14 consecutive division titles from 1991-2005, a feat that hasn’t even been approached in baseball history.

But unlike those championship teams, this iteration of the Braves suffers from a lack of overall talent and health, particularly on the pitching staff. Those limitations were on display during this weekend’s series with the Mets, as New York won two of three games.

After 25 contests, Atlanta stands at 12-13. And what is notable isn’t that the Braves have played beneath their talent level.

John Smoltz, the team ace, had four otherworldly starts, with a 0.78 ERA and 31 strikeouts in 23 innings. Even in his prime, that was unlikely to continue. But the Braves saw Sunday why relying on a 41-year-old with shoulder problems can be a dicey proposition. Smoltz’s velocity was down, and he lasted just 4 innings against New York.

That short outing was especially problematic, because number-two starter Tim Hudson had lasted just 3 innings on Saturday. The abbreviated Hudson has now appeared in two of his past three assignments, with reduced velocity that certainly points toward possible injury, though Atlanta is not acknowledging that possibility yet, at least publicly.

And for the Braves, Smoltz/Hudson was supposed to be the given. Tom Glavine, it’s easy to forget, provided solid starts to the Mets for most of 2007. But his strikeout rate dropped noticeably, and Glavine, even healthy, isn’t a good bet to be a league-average pitcher. In addition, he also made a trip to the disabled list this season—the first of his 22-year major league career.

And would-be fourth starter Mike Hampton has been hypothetical since 2005 due to a number of injuries. While warming up for his first start since August 2005, he incurred a new one, a strained left pectoral muscle, and returned to the disabled list. He is expected to return this week—but expecting any value from him seems optimistic in the extreme.

The Plan Bs in the rotation: rookie Jair Juurjens, career minor leaguer Jeff Bennett, and the uninspiring Chuck James and Jo-Jo Reyes, don’t remind anyone of the younger Smoltz-Glavine-Maddux-Avery foursome that paced Atlanta during the team’s glory years.

The bullpen is in even worse shape. The closer, Rafael Soriano, who has a history of elbow troubles, is on the disabled list. The setup man, Peter Moylan, is expected to be out for the season due to a bone spur pressing against his elbow.

Left behind are pitchers like Manny Acosta, who has struggled to throw strikes at every level, converted minor league starter Jorge Campillo, lefty mediocrities Royce Ring and Will Ohman, and Chris Resop, who owns a career major league ERA of 6.18, due largely to control problems. Only Blaine Boyer shows much promise—and Boyer, coming off of an injury himself, isn’t nearly enough.

Even the lineup, while it will continue to score runs, isn’t likely to improve. Chipper Jones, for instance, while an elite player, isn’t a .433 hitter with a .711 slugging percentage. But even less likely than Jones becoming baseball’s first .400 hitter since Ted Williams is his accumulating enough at-bats to qualify for the batting title. Jones played in Atlanta’s first 23 games, but missed Saturday and Sunday with back spasms. The last time Jones played in 92 percent of Atlanta’s contests, it was 2003—Jones has missed 25 games or more each season since.

Either way, though, the Atlanta teams that won 14 straight division titles did so on the strength of their arms. This year, the Mets’ old tormentors are a shadow of their former selves.

He wore an Atlanta Braves baseball cap at a jaunty angle, and he practically bounced as he walked. In authoritarian Syria, where the very air can seem to exhaust and oppress those who breathe it, Nash was easy to spot: a skinny Iraqi kid with a big grin and unusual, infectious energy. His accent, when he introduced himself, was pure Alabama.

“Good morning, ma’am. My name is Nashwan, but you can call me Nash—all the other Americans do. Can I help you with anything, ma’am?”

I made the first of many futile attempts to get Nash to please stop calling me Ma’am, and I asked where he came by his flawless, idiomatic English. Nash waved his hand expansively, brushing aside my question and ushering me into a classroom, and asked if I’d like tea. At 24, he was easily the youngest of the dozen or so Iraqi volunteers who were helping Western election consultants to staff the voting station, but he welcomed me in a style that suggested he ran the place.

Nash was born in Mosul, the youngest of 10 brothers. The other Americans that he’d referred to—and from whom he’d learned his astonishing Southern drawl—turned out to be the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, for whom he’d begun working as a translator while still finishing college.

Nash spoke with great affection of the American soldiers he’d worked with, from the guys his own age, who’d taught him the intricacies of American baseball, up to Gen. David Petraeus, then the commander of the 101st, on whose personal translation staff Nash had worked for a few months.

“He’s very quick with languages,” Nash recalled of the man who currently leads all U.S. forces in Iraq. “We taught him to say Ana Petraeus al-Moslawi—‘I am Petraeus of Mosul.’ He’s a very honest, kind and humble person—not like Iraqi big men, who just want you to flatter them all the time.”

Nash had been working with the American forces for about a year when his family started getting death threats from insurgents who saw Nash as a collaborator. Nash asked his American friends for help, only to be told that there was nothing they could do. For his family’s safety, he fled, alone, to Syria in January 2005.

When we met, the news coming out of Iraq was steadily getting worse, and I found his optimism moving, even shaming. If Nash could remain hopeful about his country’s future prospects in the face of open threats to his family, shouldn’t I? Though tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees were pouring into Syria, Nash’s story seemed to me to be full of especially tragic irony, but Nash himself refused to allow me to pity him. He knew the details of dozens of reconstruction projects. He wouldn’t speculate about mistakes that American forces might have made in Iraq.

“They were risking their lives to help Iraq stand up again,” Nash said. “They were like brothers to me.”

Nash wanted, most of all, to join the U.S. Army. He’d heard that non-U.S. citizens were sometimes allowed to enlist. After that, he hoped to do an M.B.A. in the U.S. or Britain before returning to Iraq to start his own business. Once he’d made his name, he hoped to enter politics.

“I want to do something for my country,” Nash said. “This is the thing I learned from the Americans. I need to go overseas and learn, and then I’m going to go back and help Iraq get on its feet.”

Unemployment in Syria is very high, and once the temporary job with the Iraq out-of-country voting program ended, Nash couldn’t find anyone willing to hire a young Iraqi refugee with no connections in Syria. His application for a U.S. visa was turned down, and his requests for information about enlisting in the U.S. Army went unanswered. He researched American M.B.A. programs online and applied for a Fulbright. But a friend who worked at the U.S. embassy in Syria told me that a young Iraqi like Nash was unlikely to get any kind of visa to the States.

“Because Iraq is a free country now,” my friend added bitterly.

In Syria, Nash seemed, if possible, to get even skinnier. When we met, his eyes seemed sad, possibly even reproachful. We fell out of touch for a while. Then, one afternoon last year, Nash called.

Nash had used the money he’d saved while working for the 101st Airborne to start a business buying up high-quality concrete in Turkey and shipping it through Syria to Iraq, where it was used in reconstruction projects. Business was good, he said.

I spent yesterday afternoon in a Damascus pizza restaurant with Nash and Ehab, a friend of Nash’s from grade school in Mosul, who also worked as a translator for U.S. troops in Iraq.

Nash no longer has any hope of returning to Iraq to enter politics. Staving off civil war is probably beyond the abilities of even Petraeus al-Moslawi, Nash told me. The young men hope only to earn enough money to get their families out. They’ve applied to the University of Malaya for business school, and if they’re accepted, they’ll move to Kuala Lumpur early this summer.

But both Nash and Ehab said that they bear the U.S. and its allies no ill will.

“I learned a lot from working with the Americans,” Ehab said. “If the U.S. invasion hadn’t come, I’d have taken my university degree, gotten a steady government job and never left Mosul. Meeting the Americans, everything changed—my principles, my thoughts about life. We became more curious. We’re interested in everything now, Nash and me. Under Saddam, we never had the right.”

I asked if the new generation of young Iraqis were feeling these same freedoms.

“We felt these benefits because we worked with the Americans directly,” Nash said. “Iraqi kids these days are really desperate. But maybe, insha’allah, when we finish business school, Ehab and I will find a way to help them.”

When titans of industry, attorneys general of the United States and Democratic Presidential candidates needed to lawyer up during the last 10 years, they all turned to David Boies. Son of a Midwestern high-school history and journalism teacher and a product of the public-school system, Mr. Boies has done better than snag a ringside seat for the last decade's biggest and most complex legal battles-he's donned the gloves himself.

But this isn't a vanity book. The bits of personal information are mostly en passant remarks about his vacations. Mr. Boies is a prodigious loafer. To hear him tell it, he's made most of his major decisions and plotted cross-examinations on beaches in the Caribbean, driving cross-country with his sons in jeeps, biking in Provence, playing craps in Vegas.

No surprise, then, that Mr. Boies started life as a slacker. After high school in California (he actually spent his teen years in Compton), he married young and began adult life as a bookkeeper and card player. His first wife persuaded him to go to college, which led to an interest in civil-rights history and then law school.

He went on to marry twice more, and begat a pair of children with each wife. Two of his wives, and three of his children, are lawyers.

His career was pretty typical for a bright young man in a white-shoe firm-until he decided, after more than two decades at Cravath, Swaine and Moore, to hang out his own shingle. He was on vacation in a Vegas hotel, heading to a craps table to indulge his quadrennial gambling habit, when he got a call from one of his Cravath partners. Mr. Boies had agreed to represent Yankees owner George Steinbrenner in litigation against Major League Baseball. The Cravath partner was calling to point out a conflict: Gerald Levin, chief executive of Time Warner, another Cravath client, objected to Mr. Boies representing the Yankees, since Ted Turner, a Time executive and also the owner of the Atlanta Braves, would be a defendant. Mr. Boies had to choose between his partnership and Mr. Steinbrenner.

"It took me about six minutes to travel from my room to the craps table. By the time I got there, there was only one solution that seemed acceptable-I would have to leave Cravath."

Within days, he set up shop inside his wife Mary's boutique Westchester law firm. It was soon obvious that his clients were hogging every phone line and fax machine in the office, not to mention his wife's paralegals and secretaries. Today, his firm, called Boies, Schiller and Flexner, has 180 lawyers and offices in 12 cities.

Courting Justice is most engaging when Mr. Boies describes his one-on-one encounters with powerful men in deposition rooms and in the witness box.

Hired to defend CBS against Gen. William Westmoreland's libel suit, Mr. Boies carefully plotted how to gently shred the respected war hero's credibility. He spent a whole day in court delicately setting General Westmoreland up, questioning him "with all the patience I could muster." Eventually, he hung General Westmoreland on his own contradictory deposition statements, leading the general to dismiss his own case.

The new Boies firm immediately faced impressive adversaries, including the Republican Party, W.R. Grace, Bill Gates and Microsoft, and a scion of one of the richest families in Central America.

Mr. Boies' glee when he verbally corners the powerful is palpable. In the chapter titled "Conversations with Bill Gates," he shares transcript tidbits from his joust with the richest man in America.

In late 1996, Microsoft began a campaign to make its browser triumphant over Netscape's Navigator. The U.S. Justice Department believed Microsoft was strong-arming customers and suppliers into using its browser, a violation of the Sherman Act. Justice called in Mr. Boies, partly because of his involvement representing I.B.M. in a monopoly case years earlier.

The deposition of Mr. Gates is highly entertaining, for the insight it provides into both his own personality and Mr. Boies' cunning and sheer joy in prodding his adversary into a verbal trap of his own making.

The deposition took place in a nondescript conference room in Seattle, with both men, Mr. Boies notes (apropos of nothing), wearing inexpensive suits. The witness was rather hostile: "I began my examination by saying good afternoon to the witness. For the first time in more than thirty years of talking depositions, I got no response."

Mr. Boies forged ahead in chilly terrain. E-mailed memos between Mr. Gates and his top executives made clear that Mr. Gates was in on the scheme to crush the competing browser. Using the tycoon's own words, Mr. Boies soon reduced Mr. Gates to evasion, and eventually pushed him into embracing logic less convincing than the Clintonian parsing of the word "is." After quoting from e-mails about Microsoft's plans for "pissing on" non-Microsoft systems, Mr. Boies soon had Mr. Gates arguing that the term "pissing on" might not, in fact, imply a particularly negative act.

Mr. Boies is best known for representing Al Gore against George W. Bush in the contested Florida election. Mr. Boies, who had previously steered clear of political causes (except for a stint in Mississippi working on civil rights in the 1960's), writes that he took the case because of its historical significance. "If I had not become a lawyer, I would have been an American history teacher like my father."

He also says he's always had a hard time saying "no." And who could refuse the besieged Democratic official in Broward County who called and said, "We need someone like you who's willing and able to fight as hard for our side as the Republicans are fighting for theirs."

As he boarded the plane for Florida, his wife warned him to "try to keep a low profile" so as not to attract the enduring wrath of the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal. That proved impossible when the Gore advisors decided his was a better public face for their cause than the lugubrious Warren Christopher.

When Mr. Boies arrived in Tallahassee on Nov. 14, campaign advisors-already preparing to be conciliatory for the greater good-"patiently explained that I was ignoring 'the political realities.'" A Times front-page article was tacked to the wall with this sentence underlined in red: "By next weekend, a group of scholars and senior politicians interviewed this weekend agreed, the presidential race of 2000 must be resolved, without recourse to the courts."

Perhaps the saddest part of the book is the few paragraphs on the questions he would have put to Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris on the stand. "I could easily envision how I would proceed. Describe all of your contacts with representatives of the Bush campaign …. It could have been a great cross-examination, but it was not to be." Rather than go straight to court, subpoena Ms. Harris and force a recount, the Gore camp decided it would be "provocative and confrontational" to subpoena the Florida secretary of state.

Mr. Boies counseled otherwise, but not-as he now writes-strenuously enough. "In retrospect … I should have pushed the issue harder. Lawyers must be prepared to tell a client what needs to be done even (indeed, particularly) where the client does not want to do it."

The rest of the 50-odd-page description of the case is uncharacteristically dry and dull, and we all know that the outcome had nothing to do with Florida law anyway. Though he has no fresh insight into the Supreme Court's power grab, Mr. Boies-who knows the ins and outs of the case cold-considers the decision to be extralegal, purely partisan and a blot on the highest court's reputation.

Overall, Mr. Boies explains his greatest cases clearly and amusingly, in layman's terms, dispensing with layers of legalese to get at the real issues-which is surely what makes him a great lawyer.

"A trial lawyer's success," he writes, "depends on his or her ability to be clear, simple and accurate at the same time. A lack of simplicity and clarity prevents a lawyer from communicating effectively. A lack of accuracy will destroy a lawyer's most important asset, credibility."

David Boies has danced countless times on the verbal tightrope between clarity and credibility. His flawless balance makes Courting Justice essential reading for students of law, and good reading for armchair news consumers who like the backstory behind the headlines.

Nina Burleigh's next book, on the scientist who founded Egyptology, will be published by Morrow in 2006.

"Wherever I go in the world, the impact of CNN is enormous," said Larry King, the Brooklyn-born baritone talk-show host who is the network's biggest star. "When I was in South Africa, everybody knew me."

There is noise-more than noise-that CNN could merge with ABC News and create Electronic Earth's supreme cable-broadcast super network. But that's down the road; AOL Time Warner and Disney need to hash it out.

Right now, Mr. Isaacson, 50, was focused on something else: He needed more people in the United States to pay attention to his shop. The name that established the defining brand in cable news, competitor-less for most of its life, CNN is now the second-place cable-news network, at least domestically, sucking dust from Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel which, with its rowdy rah-rah populist act, has torn past CNN in the ratings. It's almost as though Atlanta's other name-brand product, Coca-Cola, was finishing a wheezy second to Red Bull.

In this country, CNN's international resonance gets treated like David Hasselhoff's German recording career: Who cares? Fox doesn't have a bureau in Lagos, Nigeria, but that hasn't mattered much to the rapt viewers of Hannity & Colmes , or newspaper writers, who are generally more interested in Bill O'Reilly pounding CNN's flagship acquisition, Connie Chung, in the ratings.

As for the money, CNN still makes a lot more money off of advertising, but Fox News executives are predicting that soon would change, too.

So that means that Walter Isaacson-a professional journalist most of his life, the author of Kissinger and co-author of The Wise Men -also has to be a salesman. He not only has to run his network's news coverage-on this morning, Oct. 2, he and his colleagues were debating whether they should send a correspondent into northern Iraq, a move that could infuriate Saddam Hussein's government and lead to CNN getting booted from Baghdad-he has to market it. He wasn't holy about business-he'd been an executive for almost as long as he'd been a journalist and editor-but it was a somewhat conflict-prone role. He cited a recent CNN decision to budget $36 million far a contingency fund for Iraq war coverage.

"Thirty-six million dollars!" Mr. Isaacson said.

It was now early afternoon on Wednesday, Oct. 2, and he was enjoying an AOL Time Warner perk: He'd left work early to go to Turner Field and catch Game 1 of the National League Divisional Series between the company-owned Atlanta Braves and the San Francisco Giants.

"Now maybe we don't go to war," Mr. Isaacson said. "But that money had to come from somewhere. It came from promotion. It came from the fact that there are no billboards. It came from having no radio ads saying, 'Watch the smartest blah , blah , blah ."

It wasn't that Mr. Isaacson really wanted the billboards and radio ads. He called a lot of promotion, frankly, "masturbatory." But the tug between what's best for news coverage and what's best for ratings was one of the constant battles he'd endured since he'd taken the CNN spot in July 2001. Walter Isaacson was a newsman. He'd reaffirmed CNN's commitment to worldwide coverage. He'd hired new talent, launched new shows, and CNN's ratings needle had moved up ever so slightly. Shows like NewsNight , with its unvarnished anchor, Aaron Brown, earned praise; CNN had won a slew of awards; and a recent study showed that audiences considered CNN to be the most trustworthy of the news networks, with Fox at 8.

But why, Mr. Isaacson often heard, why weren't the numbers higher? And why was Fox still kicking ass?

"We do very fine in the overnights," Mr. Isaacson said. "We have really good audiences. But sometimes I think in the world of TV critics, it doesn't matter. If I put on Fear Factor instead of Aaron Brown and I got a 10 per cent higher audience, they would think I'm smarter and better than I am now."

Walter Isaacson was not a TV guy. When he got the gig, he was going to stick with Ted Turner's wild, original vision for CNN-the 24-hour news beast, disgorging information like a Pez dispenser.

And once he got it, what had he done with it? He'd hired Ms. Chung and Paula Zahn. He hired someone from MTV News who reminded nobody of John Chancellor. He'd pumped up the volume and graphics and instructed anchors to stop talking in that "weird singsong" voice that anchors have. He'd gone to Capitol Hill to convince the suspicious Republican leadership they'd get fair play on CNN. Mr. Isaacson was not fundamentally a TV guy; he didn't want to deviate too far from the news, what he called "the core mission of journalism." Editorially, he was a Time editor, or at least William Holden, not Faye Dunaway, in Network : that morning he ordered CNN away from a car chase-you can't beat those-to cover the legal challenge to Senator Torricelli's withdrawal from the New Jersey Senate race.

Mr. Isaacson, not without ego or ambition, decided that CNN was not just a news network, but his kind of news network, and would be sold as a news network. But it wasn't done just out of some sense of higher purpose. News was CNN's card left to play. Fox is essentially an op-news network, and so is MSNBC-actually, no one's quite sure what MSNBC has become. If CNN would only state its desires, it could own the world.

At Turner Field, Mr. Isaacson watched as his boss, Jamie Kellner appeared and took a seat in the owner's box in front of him. "Jamie is somewhat cold and calculating about it," Mr. Isaacson said. "If everyone else is going to try to put on sillier and more opinion people, then you counterprogram."

TV journalism had become something in the 21st century that nobody could have guessed. It was not necessarily the cheap-stunt sensationalism Paddy Chayefsky predicted in Network -although there was plenty of that in prime time. It primarily consisted of savvy counterprogramming. And that wasn't intrinsically Mr. Isaacson's game. A Rhodes Scholar, Henry Kissinger's biographer, he wasn't Brandon Tartikoff or Jeff Zucker; he didn't get a high-voltage electric thrill from scoping out how to place Dawson's Creek against Matlock .

But now he had to. That was his mission. And the very focus of the mission allowed him to forget about the crazed typhoon smashing around AOL-TW, about Steve Case and the stock price and the agony of Richard Parsons.

It had been a harrowing year in international news, and another war was brewing. In his better moments, he felt a sense of purpose. "I don't sit around thinking a decision I make will affect the world," he said. "I do think that if CNN does it right, it actually could matter."

Then, other times, he wasn't so sure.

"Maybe nobody cares we're in Baghdad; maybe they'd rather see that car chase," he said. "That's the struggle we're in."

Walter Isaacson wasn't a born television executive. He'll tell you that.

He said there were moments in meetings after he'd first arrived at CNN when he thought: "Oh my God, I am in an entirely different ocean. I'm not in Kansas anymore."

Actually, Mr. Isaacson was in Atlanta. A Louisiana boy who became a legendary New York social animal, he did a cultural reversal and went South Toward Home, moving into an airy loft formerly owned by a young dot-com billionaire-for-a-minute (it was equipped with a foosball table). And when the S.U.V.'s rattled by on Peachtree Street, stereo basses thumping, he wondered what in hell he'd gotten into. Although he says now the personal soul-searching was never as bad as people said, about five months into his tenure, the word began to spread that Mr. Isaacson was disillusioned at CNN.

"There was a period when no one was quite sure how engaged he was in various components of things," said David Bohrman, who produces NewsNight with Aaron Brown .

Part of it was the "anxiety every time you change the boss," said CNN's prime anchor and senior correspondent Judy Woodruff. But in those early months, Mr. Isaacson confided to friends that the head-throbbing bureaucratic and budgetary battles were a mammoth distraction. Late last year, there was the critical renegotiation of Larry King's contract, which Mr. Isaacson said caused him sleepless nights. There were the sensitive, super-sized TV egos, and something you don't have so often in print-agents. And fundamentally, TV is a separate culture from print.

"If you're the editor of a magazine, you've got a magazine every week," said the writer and editor Kurt Andersen, who worked with Mr. Isaacson at Time . "It's like, 'I did this. On some level, I am the auteur of this thing.' TV is, by its nature, kind of a moving-target, 24-7 thing that you can never quite feel ownership of."

That Fox was rubbing CNN's nose in its ratings dominance, like Billy (White Shoes) Johnson in the end zone, probably didn't make Mr. Isaacson feel any better. There were personal issues, too: Mr. Isaacson was traveling frenetically between Atlanta and Bronxville where his wife and daughter live.

But what frustrated him most, colleagues said, was the detachment from the journalism itself. Though Mr. Isaacson-as smooth an operator in a corporate culture as you could ask for-hadn't expected to ride shotgun in news trucks to fires the day he arrived at CNN, the distance from reporting was tough.

"Walter is a news guy," said Aaron Brown. "I think he suffered from a sense of loss. He could say things and direct things, but he couldn't write them or report them, and in some cases he would see them and they were not the way he wanted them, and instead he was dealing with sales and budgets and contracts and temperamental people, all of whom wanted his ear. He was a boss. And he could have been managing any number of companies, because that was all he was doing."

But Mr. Isaacson said he was happier now, settled. New shows he had developed, Connie Chung Tonight and American Morning with Paula Zahn , were on the air. He had a better sense of his colleagues; he was getting to know Atlanta. He was even getting to spend more time with his family. Bureaucratic issues were never going to go away, but Larry King had his deal and, he said of Mr. Isaacson, "I love working with him."

CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper, hired from ABC by Mr. Isaacson, said, "People feel very protective of him."

"He's very engaged now," said Mr. Bohrman.

But he had a number of battles to resolve, among them the battle between his network's Sparta and Athens, New York and Atlanta. Atlanta-the network's nascent hub and news-gathering locus-worried that too much power had shifted to New York, where the network expatriates, Mr. Brown, Ms. Chung and Ms. Zahn, were based. New York was irritated by Atlanta, feeling that it wasn't providing meatier, stronger stories that gave more than a headline and a sound bite.

Mr. Isaacson, with one foot in each city, said the tension was "partly old-new, partly Atlanta–New York, partly programs versus news-gathering." Aaron Brown, who battled regularly with Atlanta, said "the Atlanta–New York tension is very small relative to the larger angst created by redefining the relationship between shows and news-gathering." Though efforts have been made to ease the tension between the two cities, no one expects it to fully go away. CNN's Washington bureau has harrumphed and made up its mind to hold its own ground, like T-bills.

It seemed as though lately, Mr. Isaacson was growing into CNN. He began assigning stories, reading copy, talking with producers. He pronounced himself energized. "It feels more fun, but also more meaningful," he said. "I don't want to say, 'Gosh, we're about to go to war-fun!' But everybody is now focused on the journalism."

Not all was right with the world, however-not by a long shot.

What makes a TV executive a genius? Victory. And much of Mr. Isaacson's programming hasn't exactly taken off. Mr. Brown, Ms. Chung and Ms. Zahn have all improved upon the ratings performances of their predecessors, but they still lose to their competition on Fox News. (MSNBC has largely become beside the point.)

Connie Chung's launch was particularly bumpy. Critics smashed the show's first night and said that Ms. Chung looked rusty. On her second night, a kid at a restaurant near her studio pulled a fire alarm that rang through part of the show. Ms. Chung was unruffled. "Everywhere I've been, I've been in the thick of it," said Dan Rather's ex-co-anchor. But it's her task to make her boss a success. So far, not.

"Guess what-it took us a week or two. Mea culpa," Mr. Isaacson said of Ms. Chung's show. Mr. Kellner, assessing the changes overall, sounded like Ron Popeil: "The picture is cleaner and clearer; there is hardly anything about the network that hasn't been polished up a bit."

But looming above them is the dank shadow of Fox's stunning success. Once, CNN was the revolution: Ted Turner was Time 's 1991 Man of the Year. Now CNN is fusty and a little confused. Neither Mr. Kellner nor Mr. Isaacson said they'll define a show's success solely on beating Fox News in the ratings. They point to story scoops, prizes, the blossoming of Headline News-currently battling with MSNBC-and the success of CNN.com, the No. 1 news site on the Web.

Although executives at CNN are reluctant to directly take on Fox's programming or management, it's obvious they consider themselves to be in a different business from Rupert Murdoch's politically corrective news network.

Jim Walton, CNN's president and chief operating officer, rapped on a table when asked about the ratings. "It is so goddamn important that we are journalists and take the high road," he said, "because if we start getting into some of this mud and sensationalism and opinions, it's going to damage the brand and the business." It was clear Mr. Walton wasn't referring to Lifetime.

CNN, however, has been reluctant to engage Fox directly in a King Kong vs. Godzilla battle, whereas Fox is delighted to-a Fox spokesman compared Ms. Zahn's hard news turn to "putting a fresh coat of paint on an outhouse" and outside the Atlanta CNN headquarters, there's a huge thumb-in-yer-eye billboard touting Fox's ratings dominance. For the most part, Fox has enjoyed its freedom, running wild.

Roger Ailes' P.R. Dobermans have been remarkably successful cultivating the media with their eagerness to give lively quotes and play up the ratings competition like W.W.F. matches. Fox's growth is indeed a phenomenon. And inside CNN, some feel, as Aaron Brown said, that "I would be much more inclined to trade punches with Fox."

Mr. Isaacson admits that when it comes to Fox, CNN finds itself facing something of a pincer movement. On one hand, the network wants to distinguish itself as the cable-news network of distinguished, reliable journalism. Fox's news operation is but a fraction of CNN's. But Mr. Isaacson is cagey about overstating this advantage, for fear of looking elitist-Fox's game is to fight back with the class weapon, the thwwwaap! from Mr. Ailes' bludgeon. "Roger is very smart; he will just counterattack," Mr. Isaacson said.

"I don't want to get in a pissing match," Mr. Isaacson added. "I'm too timid to, in a way."

But the dogfight figures to continue. There's no evidence to suggest that Fox News' explosion is temporary, a meteor. Mr. Isaacson tries to reassure his troops that numbers aren't everything. And the troops generally agree.

"You can go crazy looking at the numbers," said Larry King, who finds himself in hot pursuit from Fox's Hannity & Colmes . "Jackie Gleason taught me a lesson years ago; he was a great, great pal to me and helped me a lot. He said, 'Pal, I could put on a pretty couple tonight having intercourse. I will win the night. It doesn't mean anything; it doesn't prove anything. What you want is to be respected, hope the people who watch you, watch you.'

"All you can do is all you can do," Mr. King continued. "I've been doing shows for 45 years. I try to do the best interviews I can. We have a great production team. All I can do is all you can do. I can't make people watch me more than they watch you. All you can do is all you can do."

The looming question is, however, as Hannity & Colmes breathes on his thick glasses, can Larry King still do all that he once did?

What reassures Mr. Isaacson is the news. It's what he knows. Whether it's prepping Election Day or preparing for Iraq. Mr. Isaacson seems more comfortable with news than any ratings point or budgetary line-item debate. Late in the afternoon of Oct. 2, as he flew to Washington, D.C., via private charter-he flew back commercial, he made sure to point out later-Mr. Isaacson talked about the northern Iraq plan with his globe-hopping president of news-gathering, Eason Jordan.

"Were going to have to take the consequences in Baghdad," Mr. Isaacson said. "Will they kick us out?"

When Mr. Jordan said they might, it was like booster shot: This was what mattered to Mr. Isaacson. "This is our strategy," he said later, as the plane cruised toward D.C. "It's really to stick to the core mission of journalism. And guess what? It's working pretty well. If you're reading some of those TV critics, it's like, 'O'Reilly beats Aaron Brown' or something like that, and people say, 'Oh, CNN is doing badly.' Well, no, we're not. We're actually doing very well.

"Sometimes we're getting beaten, but guess what? We're doing the best journalism."

A merger with ABC-or CBS, if ABC doesn't happen-would preserve that mission, said Mr. Isaacson. The conversations were still early, and in the hands of the business people. First AOL Time Warner and Disney had to figure out an ownership split-in one scenario, AOL Time Warner owns about 70 per cent to Disney's 30. Editorial management would likely be more even, but that was to be decided later.

Being "Walter Disney" was a funny thought to Mr. Isaacson: He practically shared a Bronxville backyard with ABC News' president, David Westin.

"It makes sense conceptually to have some form of alliance or combination," Mr. Isaacson said a couple of days later. "It allows you to protect the global news-gathering and journalism we feel strongly about if you have a cable as well as broadcast outlet for it."

The possible merger with ABC News has sparked conversation at CNN, which no longer has the kind of junior-partner attitude it might have had five or 10 years ago, about bureau consolidation and the potential for a conflict of cultures; broadcast and cable are different animals. More than a handful of CNN personnel are ABC expats. "I can't imagine Peter Jennings not being happy with having all the access to international bureaus that CNN has," said Ms. Chung.

Asked about how he'd respond a merger, Aaron Brown, who came from ABC News, said, "Well, it depends if I work for Peter or Peter works for me." He was joking, kind of. As was Larry King: "When they go on vacation," he asked, "do I do Good Morning America ?"

But it may be through a merger with ABC News that Mr. Isaacson gets to make his mark upon television news-not as a place-holder, but to make his own mark as a pioneer in the way that TV news executives don't often get to be pioneers any more. He has the depth to add depth and tone to television. The question is: Does Walter Isaacson have the ambition to do anything more than succeed? Does he want to become one of the hard-nosed generals in the Reuven Frank–Fred Friendly–Burton Benjamin–Roone Arledge succession of network-news heads who fought for and achieved an advance in the medium?

"The goal is to reverse the course of everybody getting out of serious news-gathering," he said. "CNN has avoided getting out of serious news-gathering. And I think we can probably avoid it another five years, maybe 10 years if we're lucky. But we know if something like this happens, we can avoid it indefinitely."

Mr. Isaacson will try and hold the fort. Even if everyone around him obsesses over ratings and the critics whack him and his shows and stars prove to be flops, he pledged to maintain news. He's no innocent-CNN will always run its share of dumb stuff. Maybe even tonight. But after a trying year and a few months in the center of it, Mr. Isaacson seemed to have begun to believe in television news, and that if it was done right, it could gain a toehold of truth in a slippery and dangerous world.

"That is why you like it," Walter Isaacson said. "That's why you don't abandon that mission."

The resurgent New York Mets played what was, in parochial baseball terms, a critical series with the Atlanta Braves at Shea Stadium over the weekend of Sept. 21-23. The team's broadcasters warned fans that they shouldn't bring backpacks or bags of any kind to the stadium, and ought to arrive early to accommodate new security procedures. When would life be normal again?

Announcements in Penn Station tell Amtrak passengers to keep their luggage in sight at all times. Police in the station are on the lookout for parcels left unattended. Commuters look warily at nearby litter baskets and recycling bins, imagining the worst. When would life be normal again?

The terrible answer must be this: not for a long, long time. Anyone who has spent time in Europe, particularly in London and Belfast, in the last few decades knows how abnormal "normal" life in New York was before Sept. 11. Halfhearted attempts at airport security? Token sign-in sheets in office towers? No special security patrols in the city's streets? An abhorrence for police profiling? What a curious notion of "normal" such ideas now seem.

Not just the threat but the reality of terrorism forced Italians to accept soldiers with Uzis in their airports, and forced the French to accept black-clad special police in the streets of Paris. It forced Londoners to accept delays and stoppages in subway service because of real or fake threats. It forced the residents of Belfast to accept long lines at public buildings as each person was searched for weapons.

The normal routines of New York life before Sept. 11 were based on the idea that global terrorism couldn't happen here. But it has, and New York will have to adjust accordingly and stop wondering when life will be "normal" again.

For author and writer Jack Holland, a native of Belfast, the past and the future melded into one astonishing sight on Sept. 11, a few hours after the Twin Towers fell. He was having lunch in midtown, near the Empire State Building, when he spotted a column of heavily armed soldiers in battle dress marching down Lexington Avenue. The troops set up a checkpoint and began stopping cars and interrogating drivers. "I thought, 'My God, where am I?'" he said. "'This can't be America. This can't be New York.' It was such an unusual sight-soldiers carrying rifles and stopping cars. It could have been a scene from Belfast in 1972."

Mr. Holland, a senior editor at the Irish Echo, lived through the abnormalities that became normal in his native city in the 1970's. "In Belfast, a city of about 500,000 at the time, you'd have lines around the block to get into Marks and Spencer [a department store] because handbags were being searched," Mr. Holland said. "People got used to it, but that's impossible to imagine in New York. The sheer scale would make it impossible to administer."

Still, New York might in other ways begin to resemble other cities that terrorists have besieged. "We've had bomb scares in the Empire State Building, Grand Central Terminal and other places," Mr. Holland said. "You can't dismiss them; you have to take full measures to ensure safety, and that leads to chaos, and chaos demoralizes everybody. Over a prolonged period of time, people get worn down, and they stop coming into the city. That's what happened in Belfast. It became an economic wasteland by 1977. People just stopped going there."

The only effective way to return New York to some semblance of "normal" life, Mr. Holland said, is counterterrorism. His book, Phoenix: Policing the Shadows, is an account of Britain's undercover fight against the I.R.A. "In counterterrorism, you learn quickly how valuable informers are," Mr. Holland said. "One good informer is worth an army. If the American government is going to spend billions to conduct this war, they could save a lot of money by getting informers into these groups. If you know what the enemy is going to do, you can prevent it. And that's the only way to stop terrorism-you have to be there when they arrive." Britain's Special Air Services paratroops were there several times in the 1980's when the I.R.A. arrived. It was never a coincidence.

Recruiting informers is a dirty, unpleasant task, but an urgent one. Counterintelligence not only can head off atrocities, but has the beneficial effect of sowing dissension and distrust in enemy ranks. Of course, those who do such work are not the kind of people one expects to find on a government payroll when life is "normal."

But, as New York residents are beginning to realize, these are not "normal" times.

Two weeks have passed since Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attended a gala dinner marking the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., where another of the honored guests on the dais was one Jörg Haider, the leader of the Austrian Freedom Party and the idol of Europe's far right. So far, Mr. Giuliani has kept his opinion of Mr. Haider to himself, although the growing likelihood that the Austrian politician will negotiate an important role in a new coalition government has provoked angry denunciations from London to Jerusalem. The European Union has threatened reprisals against Austria if Mr. Haider succeeds, with member states saying that the country's ambassadors would receive only perfunctory courtesies. Portugal has announced that it will not conduct "business as usual" with a government in which Mr. Haider is included. The Government of Israel also has talked about reprisals, and the United States has expressed deep concern.

But despite challenges from former Mayor Ed Koch and Representative Charles Rangel, the Mayor of New York–who rarely hesitates to comment on foreign affairs of interest to his constituents–has said nothing except that he didn't know Mr. Haider had been invited to the Jan. 17 event sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality. This alibi has been accepted with unaccustomed meekness by the city's Jewish organizations, usually so fierce and voluble whenever a politician betrays any hint of softness on anti-Semitism.

In fact, for some unknown reason, Jewish leaders in New York have said little at all about the impending coronation of Mr. Haider, whose party captured 27 percent of the vote in last fall's elections. There have been no press conferences outside the Austrian Consulate, no impassioned statements from the presidents of major Jewish groups, none of the activity that might be expected under these ominous circumstances.

The problem isn't any lack of familiarity with a man who is known across Europe as "the yuppie fascist." The Anti-Defamation League, for example, maintains an excellent Web site that currently features a long, heavily researched briefing about Mr. Haider's unappetizing history: his appeals to racism against immigrants, his praise of Nazis and Nazism, his own family heritage of Nazism. Truncated in most news stories, his statements are truly shocking when repeated in their entirety.

For instance, when he addressed a reunion of Waffen SS veterans several years ago, he called them "decent people who have character and who have stuck to their beliefs through the strongest head winds and who remained true to their convictions until today." Those old gangsters must have been truly touched, because no prominent person has said anything nice about them since the Nuremberg tribunal, where the Waffen SS was declared a criminal organization.

Yet the ADL isn't doing much about Mr. Haider right now. "We're keeping an eye on him," said a spokesman, who admitted: "We haven't issued anything specifically" in recent weeks. Neither has the American Jewish Congress or the American Jewish Committee, whose executive director, David Harris, said he is "very much concerned" about the political situation in Austria. He fears that a government including the Freedom Party will lend "a new aura of respectability" to xenophobia, national chauvinism and anti-Semitism. Mr. Harris also said it was "wrong" for the Mayor to remain silent on the subject after the King Day dinner. "We would expect the Mayor to criticize CORE [for hosting Mr. Haider]. He should now, and he should have then."

Of course, no sane person thinks that Mr. Giuliani endorses the Haider viewpoint on Nazis, immigrants or any other issue. Perhaps the city's Jewish leaders are simply giving a reliable friend the benefit of the doubt (although Jews are hardly the only group with an interest in combating neo-fascism).

But Mr. Koch offers another, bluntly unflattering explanation for the discreet silence of the Jewish community regarding the Mayor and the Austrian. "They're afraid!" he exclaimed. "They will do anything they possibly can to avoid criticizing him, for fear that he will use his power to punish them. They are reluctant to say something critical even in a social setting, because they're afraid it will get back to him." There are bigger things to worry about in this world than the wrath of Rudy, and one of them is about to happen in Vienna.

For example, at Stormfront.org, the Web's largest and oldest white supremacist organization (now there's a claim to fame!), chat rooms are buzzing with hundreds of tributes to Mr. Rocker, who made news in December by castigating New York's gays, immigrants and single mothers. One chat room participant wrote a poem entitled "Off Your Rocker?" The poem's sentiments can be summed up in four lines: "So you think that the country's becoming/ A little bit over-exotic./ If you were a baseball player,/ They'd suspect that you were psychotic." Not the sort of writing they teach in graduate school, although it does make its point clear.

Another participant in the chat session said that "what the Jews and liberals fear the most, they fear the truth … What 'we' need to do is support John Rocker …" The on-line magazine American Renaissance , which features a picture of the pitcher, warns that "the Rocker story is one more reminder that white Americans aren't even allowed to have their own perspective anymore. It's no longer permissible even to be provincial … No room in this world for cracker boys."

Thenthere'sIlovewhitefolks.com, which features an anonymous article entitled "Here's to John Rocker." "The witch hunt is on, and I expect to see John Rocker either crawling on his hands and knees in apology soon, or be run out of baseball," the article reads. "That is what happens in our country today if you do not worship at the altar of diversity. You can do drugs, rape women or any other sort of thing you want, and still play pro sports, but you can never, ever, disparage the sacred pseudo-religion of Diversity."

The Web site for the Council of Conservative Citizens (cofcc.org)-a St. Louis-based white supremacist organization-directs readers to "The John Rocker Page," where the relief pitcher's saga is recounted under the headlines "Enter, the Grand Inquisitors," and "To the Gulag, Go!" A pro-Rocker screed charges that in "this emerging New World (just as in the Soviet world of old), the powers that be have given notice that henceforth dissidents will be dealt with by psychiatric means."

Mr. Rocker's troubles started when he insulted New York Mets fans during the National League Championship Series last October. Then he elaborated on his views of New Yorkers to a Sports Illustrated reporter during the off-season. "The biggest thing I don't like about New York are the foreigners … How the hell did they get in this country?" he said.

Mr. Rocker went on to call one teammate a "fat monkey" and to complain about riding the No. 7 train with "some kid with purple hair next to some queer with AIDS … and some 20-year old mom with four kids. It's depressing." The reaction was swift, and Mr. Rocker was ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluation. Members of the rock band Twisted Sister, whose song, "I Wanna Rock," introduced Mr. Rocker's appearances at home games, denounced the pitcher. Then, on Jan. 31, Major League Baseball passed sentence on Mr. Rocker with the suspension and a fine.

Both Mr. Rocker and Braves owner Ted Turner declined to comment on the pitcher's popularity among hate groups. But his supporters are not nearly as reluctant to speak out. David Duke, ex-Ku Klux Klansman, onetime Presidential candidate and recently named president of National Organization for European-American Rights, told The Observer that Mr. Rocker "expressed an opinion and I think that opinion is shared by many millions of Americans, and that opinion is more prevalent than the media would let us believe." Stormfront.org director Don Black said in an interview that Mr. Rocker "pretty much said what most people feel. He was asked about New York, and most people, when they look and see what's happened to their country and the cities, they become a little angry. He's no different than anyone else. It's unfortunate that they can't express their true feelings."

Of Mr. Rocker's decision to recant his statements, Mr. Black said, "He wants to stay in baseball. Obviously, it would have been better if he had stood his ground."

That opinion seems to be shared among some of those who agreed with Mr. Rocker's remarks. William Pierce, leader of the National Alliance, a West Virginia-based anti-Semitic organization and author of The Turner Diaries , a fictional account of a race war, which inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, recently said that he saw "nothing heroic about John Rocker."

"He simply blurted out what he was thinking and then began groveling and apologizing as soon as the Jews jumped on him for it," Mr. Pierce said. "If, when the media began demanding an apology, he had told them loudly and publicly, 'Up the chimney, Jew boys!' I would consider him a hero. Of course, if he had acted heroically, he would have lost his very lucrative employment instantly. Big business and the media have no use for heroism. It scares them."

Matthew Hale, who serves as "Pontifex Maximus" of the World Church of the Creator, which he runs out of his mother's house in Chicago, said, "We're disappointed that he didn't show the resolve to stand by his statements but sending someone to a psychological exam because of their point of view is wrong."

By turning Mr. Rocker's opinions into evidence of a medical condition, Major League Baseball opened itself up to the obvious criticism that Mr. Rocker has been dispatched to the equivalent of a re-education camp. Suddenly, bigots and haters can claim to be First Amendment heroes. And suddenly John Rocker, of all people, is a martyr. And Mr. Turner will now be able to welcome back his star pitcher in May, announcing to the world that Mr. Rocker has been cured of his malady.

In which case his supporters may have to discard him in favor of a new hero. There's a politician in Austria who has been making news lately, although it's not certain whether the Freedom Party's Jörg Haider has ever taken the Flushing line to Queens.

Regardless of who really made the connection between baseball and American culture, you could do worse in the aphorism department. God forbid if anybody ever seriously suggested that to know America, one must first understand, say, Talk magazine.

If this year's National League Championship Series between the Braves and the Mets was a window on the wider world of end-of-century America, it would be hard not to conclude that the cultural apocalypse is indeed upon us. We're not slouching towards Gomorrah. We've already crossed the city line.

And it comes down to professional wrestling. This cheesy entertainment, celebrated and indeed promoted in the usual ironic way among the media elites who think all the fake blood and the obscenities and the casual misogyny are really funny in their ironic way, has so penetrated the culture that we apparently don't even notice that its production values have ravaged homespun baseball, and therefore, the living room.

Game 5 of the N.L.C.S., that 15-inning instant classic at Shea Stadium which captured the attention of all but the athletically challenged, may be remembered for all sorts of wonderful drama, but one decidedly un-wonderful moment offered a glimpse through that famous wider window. NBC's cameras, searching the crowd for telling images, found a boy of about 10 caught up in the excitement. Ah, a Ken Burns moment! Alas, the young lad was wearing a T-shirt that read: "Chipper Suck This." And, for the benefit of Chipper Jones, the Met-killing Atlanta third-baseman, the shirt contained an arrow pointing to the innocent little lad's crotch.

Yep: DeTocqueville or Lincoln or Wilde or whoever certainly had it right. To understand America, you have to understand why a 10-year-old was wearing an obscene T-shirt at a championship baseball game.

These sorts of vulgar sentiments are regularly expressed on prime-time television on the various professional wrestling shows whose plot lines are crafted by some of the Ivy League's finest minds. Not coincidentally, the Mets-Braves series was marred by wrestlinglike confrontations between Atlanta's star reliever, the crotch-grabbing, middle-finger-waving John Rocker (even his name suggests a cartoonlike villainy), and Mets' fans, each playing an assigned role in the script. Wouldn't you know-Mr. Rocker is a devotee of professional wrestling; his employer, Ted Turner, owns a professional wrestling federation; and one of the stars of Mr. Turner's sweaty stable was recruited to sing "The Star Spangled Banner" before Game 1 of that holy rite of fall known as the League Championship Series.

The coarse and even dangerous taunting between the self-appointed bad guy (Mr. Rocker) and the hot-breathed Shea Stadium crowd was hardly the only example in recent weeks of fans and players behaving badly. Football fans in Philadelphia cheered when a bad guy, Michael Irvin of the Dallas Cowboys, was severely injured (and momentarily paralyzed) during a game with the Eagles; Boston fans hurled missiles at Yankee players, forcing the players to take cover; Mike Ditka, coach of the New Orleans Saints, gestured obscenely to less-than-appreciative hometown fans. Charming.

The world-weary will note that sports stadiums are not cathedrals, that fans have always erred on the side of vulgarity in making their opinions known. But it was one thing for fans of the football Giants to sing "Goodbye, Allie" to embattled head coach Allie Sherman in the mid-1960's; it is quite another to experience the catcalls in Yankee Stadium's bleachers, where women of all ages, shapes and sizes are regularly invited to display their breasts.

I called my friend Phil Mushnick, sports columnist of the New York Post , to ask how we've managed to get from "Goodbye, Allie" to "Chipper Suck This." Mr. Mushnick, who ought to win a Pulitzer Prize for his relentless exposure of pro wrestling's corrosive effects on children and mainstream sports, noted that the wrestling mentality has produced a generation of fans that associates sports with vulgar, violent spectacle. "Watch these shows," he fairly demanded. "You hear women described as bitches and ho's all the time. And this is on prime time, when kids are watching." T-shirts like "Chipper Suck This" are commonly displayed on these shows, as are raised middle fingers. "And last night, a 9-year-old girl stopped by our house to pick up a newspaper," he said. "She ran out saying she had to get home because wrestling was on."

Behold tomorrow's American, tomorrow's baseball fan.

A banquet hall full of amateur and professional baseball players, coaches, writers, players' association officials and mayoral advance men stiffened a little when Mr. Grande, the master of ceremonies for amateur baseball's Golden Spikes Award dinner on Nov. 11 at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, mentioned the Yankees' manager and the Yankees' current nemesis in the same sentence.

Mr. Boras, the most powerful agent in the major leagues, represents Bernie Williams, the Yankees' star center fielder, and he is currently guiding the soft-spoken Mr. Williams into a tabloid-ready contractual game of chicken with the Yankees' principal owner, George Steinbrenner.

Mr. Grande went on. "If you guys could get a little closer together," he said, grinning deviously in the direction of Mr. Torre and Mr. Boras, sitting 15 feet from each other, "then maybe we could get Bernie Williams to sign."

It was a silly idea, of course. Everyone knew Mr. Torre had no say in the matter; they also knew that Mr. Boras has the Yankees by the jockstrap. And on this night at the Waldorf, in these player-friendly quarters, nobody objected. Around here, Mr. Boras was a star, not a scourge.

Mr. Boras, a 44-year-old former minor leaguer and medical litigator, is widely regarded as one of the toughest negotiators in baseball and as thorough and imaginative a player-advocate as there is in the game. Owners hate him; general managers hate having to deal with him. More than any other agent, he has whipped them in arbitration and has repeatedly raised the bar in the free-agent market-his client Greg Maddux, the pitching ace of the Atlanta Braves, just signed the most lucrative contract in baseball, for an average of $11.5 million a year. He has some 35 major league clients, among them Steve Avery, Carlos Baerga, Tim Belcher, Jay Bell (who on Nov. 17 signed a $34 million contract with the Arizona Diamondbacks), Andy Benes, Kevin Brown, Charles Johnson Jr., Andruw Jones, Alex Ochoa and Alex Rodriguez.

Baseball executives have likened Mr. Boras to a cult leader, pitching adherents a blend of statistical logic and holistic self-enhancement to get them to buy into his program and launch protracted and often bruising battles with management. He describes himself as "father, priest, lawyer and disciplinarian," a man whose business it is to build up a client's self-esteem-"I tell them who they are before they are," he explained-and then sell this confident, swaggering package to baseball's general managers.

A Full-Service Agent

Mr. Boras' services don't stop at the bargaining table, and his claims to success are not restricted to contracts. This is a man who gets into the head of his clients, a man who will call a team's top executives and tell them how to coach his client.

Mr. Boras made a convert of Keith Hernandez after the first baseman left the Mets for the Cleveland Indians in 1990. "I was miserable in Cleveland," Mr. Hernandez said. "My career was coming to an end. Injuries were catching up to me. My career was not ending the way I wanted it to. I was very upset. Scott actually got me into psychiatric therapy. I don't think a lot of agents have that kind of savvy, that breadth of knowledge."

Mr. Boras referred Mr. Hernandez to Harvey Dorfman, who serves as a sports psychologist and a consultant for the Scott Boras Corporation. "Harvey came out and spent a week with me and helped me through a really tough time in my life," Mr. Hernandez said. "He got me involved with therapy. I continue with the therapy. I find it enlightening."

"We make it part of our system," Mr. Boras said of Mr. Dorfman's services. "We don't wait for an issue to arise. It's more an academic and holistic exercise than it is an exercise in need."

Of course, there are needy players out there-emotionally needy, that is. And Mr. Boras isn't shy about explaining the role he plays in shaping his clients' minds as well as their wallets. Charles Johnson, the Florida Marlins' fine catcher and a client of Mr. Boras, was having a tough time at the plate last spring. Nevertheless, he was selected for the All-Star Game.

Mr. Johnson confessed to feeling unworthy of the honor. And Mr. Boras was there for him.

"Seventy percent of what I do," Mr. Boras said, "is sitting down with a Charles Johnson at the All-Star Game. He was hitting .218 at that point, and he was really having a difficult time being there because he was hitting 70 points below anybody there. And we talked about his value in the game, his value to the team. I got him to talk to [Braves and National League All-Star team manager] Bobby Cox. Bobby came by and I said, 'Bobby, why don't you tell Charlie why he's here?' And Bobby said, in a very special way: 'I'll tell you why you're here, Charlie. I selected you because I wanna fucking win. That's why. You're the best damn defensive catcher in the game, and I don't give a shit what you hit.' And Bobby walked away, and Charlie said, 'Wow.' And I said, 'Charlie, he doesn't say that to just anybody. What you need to know from that conversation is that the batter's box, from heretofore, should be nothing but the fun zone. Let it go. Who cares?' He hit .310, .320, in the second half, and he hit for power. He now has the understanding."

After the Waldorf dinner was over, Mr. Boras worked the banquet hall as it emptied. He was puffy-cheeked and a little pink, and he had gone to some lengths to disguise his thinning hair, but he looked fit in a double-breasted olive brown suit. He exchanged a few light punches with one young prospect, then settled down to talk business with Mr. Johnson and his wife, Rhonda, who were at the dinner. The two listened intently as Mr. Boras said of a Marlin official, "He needs to hear from the heart of his players." He touched his heart. The couple nodded. They had the understanding.

Mr. Boras was the last to leave the hall. With some of his younger clients and a colleague in tow, he moved through the hotel lobby, leading them toward the Loews New York Hotel across the street, where they were staying. Among those following the agent was a tall 18-year-old pitcher named Matt White, who, thanks to Mr. Boras, had recently become a millionaire 10 times over. Mr. White seemed amused that anyone would want to write a story about his agent. "This pond scum?" he deadpanned. Mr. Boras laughed it off and marched ahead. Outside he made a wrong turn, walked half a block in the wrong direction and joked, "We're going to Yankee Stadium!"

For their part, the Yankees are not making jokes about Mr. Boras, although some executives might second Mr. White's jocular assessment of him. In 1991, he persuaded the team to fork over $1.55 million to sign hot pitching prospect Brien Taylor. The Yankees took a lot of heat for that one, especially after Mr. Taylor hurt his arm in a brawl and ruined his career before it had started. Later, Mr. Boras got the Yankees to pay $20 million for hurler Kenny Rogers. Mr. Rogers was a bust, and the team had to pay to get rid of him earlier this month.

The Yankees and Bernie Williams have a checkered past, too. Mr. Boras has represented Mr. Williams since he first met the 16-year-old prospect in Puerto Rico. "He was a gazelle," he remembered, "a very unusual athlete for baseball." Mr. Boras has watched Mr. Williams fulfill some of the promise he saw in him 11 years ago. And he has repeatedly heard the Yankees describe Mr. Williams as good , but not great . That's not what Mr. Boras, builder of self-esteem, likes to hear.

Mr. Boras earns his nonnegotiable 5 percent of his clients' contracts by convincing them that they are invaluable, that they are worth the money he's trying to get them. He teaches players to appreciate their own talents. Then he sells the package. "I've had a player come to me and say, 'I wanna see you tell my story in arbitration.' And I said, 'But what if they make you a pure offer beforehand?'

"And he said, 'No, I wanna hear the story.' And I'll tell you something. That's my job: to go ahead then and tell the story."

"Any time I've had a player go to arbitration, win or lose, they've had a great year the next year," he said. "They understand themselves. My job is to help the players understand themselves."

These days, Mr. Boras is trying to help Bernie Williams understand himself. The Yankees have offered Mr. Williams $37.5 million over five years; Mr. Boras has indicated that his client would rather have about $70 million over seven years. If the two sides can't manage to work out their differences (by January or else, Mr. Boras insists), Mr. Williams will be a free agent at the end of next season-at which point the Yankees probably will have to pay him the $10 million a year to keep him. The team's other option is to trade him now, before they lose him later.

To hear Mr. Boras tell it, Bernie Williams isn't greedy. He's just a little curious. Like most players, Mr. Williams wants to know not just what he's worth on the open market, but what everyone thinks he's worth. He wants to be shown not just the money, but the love. "More often than not, free agency isn't about money, it's about curiosity," Mr. Boras said. And when it's about curiosity, Mr. Boras is the best in the business at exploiting the situation to his and his client's benefit. As he likes to say, "What I'm about is information."

Mr. Boras' information, from his "statistical packets" to his intimate knowledge of what keeps ballplayers awake at night, helps turn curiosity into money.

Follow the Leader

After he found his way to the Loews Hotel, Mr. Boras was sitting at a table in the bar, drinking an iced tea. He checked his watch-a St. Louis Cardinals watch given him two decades ago by Stan Musial when Mr. Boras was named the best player in the Cardinals' minor league system. It was around midnight, and he still had work to do. He had young clients upstairs, and they'd want him to hang out with them.

For the moment, though, Mr. Boras was reflective. "I've been fired," he said, talking about his less successful ventures in agentry. "If you're good at what you do in this business, you're gonna get fired. I went to a guy and said, 'You're overweight and you're out of shape.' And he goes, 'No. The teams don't offer me a contract because they're mad at you, because you beat them in arbitration.' And I go, 'But I won the case for you . You made an extra million because of that case, and now you're saying that's a negative? If you continue to play well …' And the player goes, 'No, no, it's not me. It's you.' And I'm going, 'No, it is you , it is you .'"

A colleague came by and gave him a message; he should call Kevin Brown, the Florida Marlins' ace pitcher and one of Mr. Boras' clients. Mr. Brown had been the subject of trade rumors, a development that makes even the most secure athlete jittery. Such an athlete needs a healthy dose of Scott Boras. So after finishing his iced tea, he excused himself at 12:30 A.M. to head upstairs, call Kevin Brown and rejoin his young clients.

"I don't run my life," he said, shrugging.

And then he was off to attend to the business of running other people's lives.