In the late spring of 2002, those of us who spend our time listening to sports radio while quietly questioning what's gone wrong with our lives heard perhaps a week's worth of rants, by everyone from Tony Kornheiser to Mike and the Mad Dog to Marcus, the 23-year-old who hosts the Sports and Grain Report in Iowa City, about a book being shopped around by former major leaguer Jose Canseco. Mr. Canseco-the famously buff, argumentative former slugger who once dated Madonna and had a ball bounce off his head for a home run, said he had something to say about steroids. Major leaguers used them, he said, and he was ready, in the spirit of Elia Kazan, to name names.

As it turned out, Mr. Canseco couldn't find the book deal he so desperately wanted, and now the yammering over his allegations has been drowned out by the uproar over pitcher David Wells and his memoir, Perfect I'm Not . Mr. Wells, currently a starting pitcher with the Yankees, was a presence on two of the team's championship runs, in 1998 and 1999, playing the good ol' no-nonsense fat boy who evoked invented memories of Babe Ruth. But after it was discovered that advance copies of Perfect I'm Not claimed that 25 to 40 percent of major leaguers use steroids and that Mr. Wells pitched his 1998 perfect game "half-drunk," good ol' Boomer Wells became the most hated player in spring training since Garrett Morris' fictional shortstop, Chico Escuela, showed up to camp after writing his tell-all Bad Stuff 'bout the Mets . Mr. Wells apologized to his Yankee teammates and toned down certain passages for the book's final version. His team fined him $100,000.

Now we're left with the book itself. And that's a problem. For starters, Mr. Wells doesn't point the finger at any steroid users besides Mr. Canseco and former San Diego and Houston third baseman Ken Caminiti, both of whom have come clean about their drug use. Mr. Wells still claims that steroids are being used (though he has revised his estimate down to something like 10 to 25 percent of players). Otherwise, this is a dry, season-by-season account of two decades in professional baseball, peppered with expletives and off-color adjectives. Like Mr. Wells himself, Perfect I'm Not hurtles hard but aimlessly through seasons, teammates and managers.

This should be an interesting story. Here's a man raised around a band of Hell's Angels, who struggled for years as a major leaguer-someone known only to the bespectacled men clutching Street & Smith annuals and crunching rotisserie statistics. Then he became a good pitcher with teams like Detroit, Baltimore and Cincinnati-and upon his arrival with the Yankees in 1997, became the brassy champion of every drunk, shirtless man sitting in the bleachers of the Bronx. But Mr. Wells is mostly interested in his own celebrity, and his public persona as the hard-charging everyman. It's typical that he starts off his book with a chapter on how he came to dress in drag on Saturday Night Live . Some players are desperate to keep their carousing a secret; Mr. Wells seems determined to exploit his after-hours hanky-panky for promotional use.

The offensive thing here isn't that Mr. Wells went out on an all-night bender with the cast of Saturday Night Live the night before he pitched the first perfect game for the Yankees since Don Larsen. It's that the whole book seems like a tedious mission of vindication for a boozing lifestyle occasionally broken up by drunken fistfights. And it's never Mr. Wells' fault-not the fisticuffs with the cops in Chicago, nor the bloody brawl with two men the night of his mother's funeral. Also not his fault: his release, early in his career, from the Toronto Blue Jays, or his public castigation of slugger Frank Thomas in 2001, his teammate at the time with the Chicago White Sox.

Presumably written in his own voice, Mr. Wells goes out of his way to insult the mental capacity of every reader over the age of 16. He writes that he hates being injured because "I LOVE pitching," but offers little help in understanding what-besides blaring Metallica-motivates the most important player on the field at any given time. He offers up a list of banal commandments for rookies ("Keep the beer cold and available") and, as an extra-special bonus, gives us the "David Wells 'Got-Balls-Star' Team" of his favorite players. He tells about one case of dysentery, and about a case of stomach flu cured by "one very brave trainer with a suppository gun." Oh, by the way, ballplayers have sex on road trips, and "stat sheets don't mean dick."

We know what Mr. Wells is trying to do. He's trying to shock and titillate, and at the same time make us love him. He wants his autobiography to be the muscle-shirted, loudmouthed, 21st-century version of Jim Bouton's Ball Four . But he can't pull it off. Even with the help of ghostwriter Chris Kreski, Mr. Wells can't do what Mr. Bouton was able to do all on his own: expose the frailties and moral failings of ballplayers while making us appreciate the greatest game ever invented.

Maybe that's too much to ask. With very few exceptions, the experience of reading any athlete's autobiography always feels a little like the scene late in Everybody's All-American , when a former football star forces his wife and cousin and the cousin's girlfriend to listen to his own cassette-recorded account of his playing days. The warm feelings of fans and competition, of winning, of being in the moment-they're all gone, replaced by this terrible, deflated retelling.

Of course, some ghostwriters can pull the best out of their subjects. They give order where typically there's none; they give new life to vanished emotion. But one gets the feeling that even Dick Schaap would have a hard time crafting a sensible story if he were working with David Wells. In the end, Boomer's just an ass.

Sridhar Pappu writes Off the Record for The Observer.

The first pitch of the Queens Kings' home opener was just minutes away. Mr. Cohen, the team's general manager, watched as two groundskeepers laid out the batter's box, a last touch on the $6 million in publicly financed renovations made to the club's temporary home field on the campus of St. John's University.

Mr. Cohen's boss, Fred Wilpon, co-owner of the New York Mets, was on his way to the ballpark. So was Queens Borough President Claire Shulman. And, most important of all, so was Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the undisputed prime mover behind the city's $180 million effort to bring two minor league baseball teams to this most major league of cities.

For Mr. Giuliani, the Kings' opener on June 21 was the culmination of years of negotiations, backroom politics and public expense to find homes for low-level affiliates of the Mets and Yankees. The Kings, currently an affiliate of the Toronto Blue Jays but due to become a Mets franchise next year, have signed a long-term lease with the city for a new permanent ballpark in Coney Island, while the Staten Island Yankees franchise, which began play last year, signed a similar lease for a new stadium in the St. George section of the borough. The two teams play in the New York-Penn League, a Single-A league (one step above instructional leagues) that plays a short, 76-game season.

Though City Hall has celebrated the arrival of the two teams, as Mr. Cohen awaited the first pitch, he was still faced with the dilemma of selling the team to a community that never really wanted it. In fact, some Queens residents have gone to court to shut down the team's temporary home. As game time approached, some 60 protesters marched outside the ballpark, along a narrow swath of sidewalk marked off by blue police barriers. They chanted "No Stadium!" and carried signs decrying "Rudy's Crooked Deal."

Suddenly, there was a rush of suits by the visitors' dugout. The Mayor had arrived, wearing a gray suit and a purple cap emblazoned with a yellow script "Q," the team emblem. Mr. Wilpon and an entourage of Mets brass trailed him onto the field.

Mrs. Shulman, a Democrat who supported Mr. Giuliani's 1997 re-election bid, warmed up the crowd.

"And now, you know who made this all possible, don't you?" she asked.

"He certainly did," Mets executive Mark Bingham said wryly to Mr. Wilpon and his son, Jeff, as the three stood near the backstop, watching the scene.

Almost drowned out by a chorus of boos and cheers, Mrs. Shulman continued: "The great mayor of the greatest city–Rudy Giuliani!"

The Mayor walked to the mound. "Now in New York City," Mr. Giuliani told the crowd, "we have four professional baseball teams, even more than when we had the Yankees, the Dodgers and the Giants."

And we're going to pay for the privilege. The $6 million spent to renovate the St. John's ballpark is just the beginning. The city is spending $31 million to build the Kings a permanent home along the Coney Island boardwalk. To get the locals there to go along, Mr. Giuliani threw in $30 million for improvements to the boardwalk, new bathrooms and other needed projects. And that's not all–he added $37 million more for a local development corporation that may one day build an amateur athletic facility that had been planned for the site before the Mets came along. According to the deal the Mets and the city reached in September 1998, as well as subsequent agreements, the team will sign a 20-year lease for the ballpark. The amount of rent the Mets pay will be based on how much money the team makes–meaning the city is materially invested in the team's success.

The Staten Island team, meanwhile, is playing on its own temporary ballpark at the College of Staten Island (the city spent $5 million to renovate the field for the minor leaguers) until it moves into a $71 million facility already rising next to the St. George Ferry Terminal. They will have the same rent deal as the Mets.

Huge Price Tag

According to the city's Independent Budget Office, the total price of all this baseball development over the next four years ($180 million) amounts to six times the amount it will spend on police cars ($26 million). It's more than the budget for new fire trucks ($134 million), the development of Hudson River Park ($94 million) and the capital budget for public libraries ($78 million). For an administration that has done fairly little in the way of traditional infrastructural development–creating none of the bridges, tunnels or public housing projects that stand as testament to its predecessors–these stadiums represent Mr. Giuliani's hope for a concrete legacy as he prepares for his final year in office.

Like many men who grew up in the heyday of Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Duke Snider in the 1950's, Mr. Giuliani is a fervent believer in the moral sanctity of baseball. Like mayors all over the country, he is a convert to the idea of using professional sports, and publicly financed stadiums, as a spur to economic development. Sports economists, like Smith College's Andrew Zimbalist, have published reams of research casting doubt on this theory, but that's done little to dissuade Mr. Giuliani, who, in addition to his minor league ventures, has proposed new stadiums for the major league Mets, Yankees and perhaps the National Football League's Jets, at a possible cost of $2 billion.

Cost Overruns

Several years ago, Robert Julian, president of the New York-Penn League, broached the idea of moving into New York City to the Giuliani administration. "Once there was an ever-so-slight tentative expression of interest," he said, "Mayor Giuliani and his people were just all over it, and drove it with vigor."

Under major league baseball rules, each team could veto the other's deal with the city. So both had to get a minor league affiliate. Mr. Steinbrenner wanted to be on Staten Island. In January 1998, Mr. Wilpon–like Mr. Giuliani, a Brooklyn native–suggested that his team move to the city-owned site of the old Steeplechase Park.

"I went to the mayor and said, 'What about this location?' and he looked into it and said, 'Yeah, that'd be the perfect place,'" Mr. Wilpon recalled.

Even Mr. Giuliani's enthusiasm was tempered, however, when the cost estimates for two new 6,000-seat stadiums began moving north at an alarming speed. Instead of the original estimate of $20 million for the Staten Island stadium, the projected price tag quickly doubled. When a more realistic cost estimate–still lower than the eventual $71 million price tag–was presented to Mr. Giuliani during a meeting with top aides and Staten Island Borough President Guy Molinari, the Mayor "blew his stack," according to one person present at the meeting, and said he doubted the project was worth doing for that much.

Mr. Giuliani eventually came back around to supporting the project. Not so Howard Golden, the Brooklyn borough president. When the Mayor announced a tentative agreement with the teams in September 1998, Mr. Golden issued a statement that hearkened back to his borough's deepest baseball betrayal: "It is disappointing to hear that the plan involves a Single-A Mets team, the lowest level minor league affiliate, since Brooklyn, home of the world-champion Dodgers, is clearly a major league town."

On his radio show, Mr. Giuliani urged listeners to call Mr. Golden "and tell him, 'Get your head examined!'"

Mr. Golden wanted to build his own pet project, a $67 million amateur athletic facility called the Sportsplex, on the site designated for the Coney Island ballpark. The borough president, backed by Coney Island's community board, began working to undermine the deal. First, he filed a lawsuit in opposition to the team's plans to build a temporary field at Prospect Park's Parade Grounds, forcing the city to find it new temporary quarters in Queens.

There, the team faced more groups of residents who were angry about noise, traffic and light coming from the ballfield during night games. At a town hall meeting in February held to discuss the issue, Mr. Giuliani told a roomful of angry people, "You can vote for Hillary ... I don't care."

Instead they filed a lawsuit to shut down the stadium. They're still waiting for a July 20 hearing in State Supreme Court.

In Coney Island, however, Mr. Giuliani outmaneuvered his opponents. He offered a deal to Brooklyn City Councilman Herbert Berman, chairman of the Council's Finance Committee, a Golden rival and a possible candidate for City Comptroller next year. There would be a $30 million investment package in it for the community–including new boardwalk bathrooms and motorized carts for the beach police (at $22,000 apiece)–if residents and local leaders went along with the stadium. In addition, the Sportsplex would get $37 million in city money, but it would be administered by a local development corporation with a board appointed by the Mayor, not controlled by Mr. Golden.

Mr. Berman took the deal to Marty Levine, then chairman of Brooklyn's Community Board 13. He jumped.

"The initial reaction was that we had our hopes pinned on the Sportsplex development ... and we didn't really care about a Single-A minor league team," Mr. Levine said. "But in the end it worked out very well for us."

When the ballpark is completed, the spidery tower of the old parachute jump will loom over the right field wall; the dilapidated, overgrown Thunderbolt rollercoaster, perhaps the city's largest freestanding metaphor, will run along the left field line. Gesturing to a grassy patch beyond the imagined outfield wall, Mr. Levine said: "What we're looking to do for any future development is put some restaurants along the boardwalk."

"Already, we're seeing effects in terms of real estate values, properties sold at multiples of what was previously estimated," Michael Carey, president of the city's Economic Development Corporation, said on opening night in Queens. Between bites of a hot dog, he invoked the crowd, 2,400 strong, mostly families with children.

"It's a much more picturesque, county-fair- type atmosphere," he said.

But for the Kings, the sad fact remains that, so far, opening night represents the apogee of the team's success, at least in the category that matters most to the Mets. As of July 8, it stood dead last in New York-Penn League paid attendance, averaging a mere 986 fans a game. Mr. Cohen, the general manager, says several factors have played a role, including the late start he got selling season tickets, bad press because of the lawsuit and the presence of Shea Stadium just up the road, where the Mets have lately had a couple of big series with the Braves and the Yankees.

Kings of Queens

The AWOL fans have missed some entertaining, and at times stirring, baseball. On opening night, for instance, the Kings were down 9-2 in the eighth inning, only to come back and win 10-9. The following Sunday, around 500 fans were on hand to see Brian Cardwell, the team's preseason ace, take the mound against the Batavia Muckdogs.

Mr. Cardwell didn't have much. His fastball, normally in the low 90 m.p.h. range, was only hitting the mid-80's. In the second inning, he gave up a couple of hits. Then a batter reached on an error–at this level of professional baseball, they litter the boxscore like sunflower shells on the dugout floor. Mr. Cardwell left a pitch high, and the ball left high, out of the ballpark.

At 6-foot-10, Mr. Cardwell's physique has evoked comparisons to that of Randy Johnson, the ace of the Arizona Diamondbacks. He wears a goatee and a tongue stud ("Don't make fun of that, O.K.?" he asked a reporter), but still speaks with a low country drawl and the credulity of a schoolboy from Oklahoma taken in the fourth round of last year's draft.

"A couple of us went down to Times Square the other day. It's crazy, a lot different from where I'm from," he said. "You feel like a midget in a giant's world when you walk off of the subway."

Down 5-0 after the second inning, Mr. Cardwell and the Kings held the Muckdogs close for the rest of the game, and came back to win, 7-6, in 11 innings, on a sacrifice fly by outfielder Brian Sellier. A few games later, Mr. Cardwell went down with a bum elbow. ("It's been bothering me all year," he said later, "but last week it started barking pretty bad.") In three games, he'd struck out 15 in 14 innings, but sported an unsightly 7.71 earned run average. Still, when the suggestion was made that, at 19, he might expect to spend a few more years in the minors, he laughed. "That's an insult," he said.

The team's roster includes 31 players from six countries. Most will never see the major leagues. They're just out of high school, or college, or the Dominican and Venezuelan winter leagues, and whether they know it or not, most are there only to fill out the roster around a few top-tier prospects. Reminders of the cruel nature of the business are never far away.

After the win against the Muckdogs, Mr. Cardwell's battery-mate, catcher Buster Small, packed up his things in a duffel bag, thinking about his hitting. "I'm like an automatic out up there right now," he said, shaking his head. Unlike many of his teammates, Mr. Small is a college graduate. Of Princeton, in fact. He was drafted last spring and went to play professional baseball right after graduation. Despite his struggles, he said he still had hopes of playing in the major leagues.

"My brother works at Goldman Sachs," he said, "working 90- or 100-hour weeks. I don't really want to join the real world. I just want to play baseball as long as it goes."

A few days later, Mr. Small, who had just two hits in 15 at-bats, was demoted to Medicine Hat in the Pioneer League.

The Kings fans are more forgiving. After a 3-2 loss July 9, which ended with the lead runner being caught in a rundown off third base, fans crowded around the home team dugout, offering a pat on the back or a baseball to be signed. The crowd was a cross section of the types of people Mr. Cohen has talked about attracting to the games–kids in uniform, loud, beer-bellied men in Mets caps, a group of Dominicans cheering on in Spanish. The problem was there were just 660 of them.

Mr. Cohen said he's hoping for an uptick in attendance during the second half of the season. And the team hopes to draw 200,000 fans next year, when the team is scheduled to be playing in Coney Island. He's also looking forward to getting real Mets minor leaguers next year, after the team's affiliation with the Blue Jays ends. The Yankees have lately been using their Staten Island team as a showcase for talent that might normally be in higher-level ball, like phenom pitcher Chien-Ming "Tiger" Wang, a Taiwanese native and $2.1 million bonus baby. It's paid off in attendance; the Staten Island Yankees–or "Our Yanks," as the daily Staten Island Advance has called them in its overwhelmingly favorable coverage–are averaging 3,500 a game.

Since the teams' recent "Verranzano-Narrows Bridge Series" (won by the Yankees, two games to one), the Staten Island ringers have been the source of grumbling among some Kings players. "You know Steinbrenner's family owns the team," Mr. Cardwell said ruefully.

And so, a new rivalry was born. Somewhere–maybe in his Yankee Stadium box seat–Rudy Giuliani must have been smiling.

A reporter approached him to ask a question, but Mr. Bell put his hand up and said, very politely, "I'll be with you all in a minute. I got to get my coordination right."

There, lined up before him, were five pairs of Mauri alligator-skin shoes:tan-and-olive, lime-olive-white, yellow-brown, gray-slate and light-blue, and solid dark blue. Nearby were five matching alligator-skin belts. Five suits hung in his locker next to five shirts. He stood before it all, deciding which shoes went with which suits. His suits are custom-made; he wears them only once, before giving them away to friends. So it was very important that he get his coordination right.

"Yo Vinny!" he called out suddenly to Vinny Greco, the assistant equipment manager. "I need some hanging bags!"

The clubhouse guys are not yet quite accustomed to Mr. Bell. In fact, he has taken everyone by surprise. He came to the Mets as a throw-in in its December trade with the Houston Astros, when they got pitcher Mike Hampton. The Astros basically forced the Mets to take Mr. Bell and his bloated$5-million-per-year contract. At 31, he wasn't supposed to be all that good. Plagued by rib cage and groin injuries, he batted a dismal .236 last season, and bottomed out with the Houston media and the Astros fans after he slammed manager Larry Dierker in the press the day Mr. Dierker returned from brain surgery. Mr. Dierker had merely moved him down in the batting order.

But in his first month with the Mets, Mr. Bell has thrived. His .370 average is seventh in the National League, and he leads the league in hits. On April 24, he was named National League Player of the Week. In a six-game stretch he batted over .600.

What's more, he has added a little life to a clubhouse that's more mature than those in Shea's past, what with a brooding Mike Piazza, a moody Rickey Henderson and an Edgardo Alfonzo so focused he could almost make it as a Yankee. Into that hushed atmosphere comes Mr. Bell, the sad-eyed, hyperactive clown of New York baseball, with the soul of a 13-year-old and the old-man face of Mr. Magoo.

"He's a breath of fresh air," said Keith Hernandez, who played at Shea back in the free-wheeling days of Dwight Gooden, Darryl Strawberry and Lenny Dykstra. "There are a lot of serious guys on that team. There's too much seriousness. He's just a character, and there should be more personalities like him in baseball."

"He's got a big, ol' heart," said Gene Pemberton, the Astros' team chaplain, who developed a close friendship with Mr. Bell when he was in Houston. "But when people start getting on him, it can get to him. You all can really rattle people's cages up there, can't you? He says it doesn't bother him, but wait 'til he gets in a little slump."

Something About Derek

"Titties!" Mr. Bell called out. He has a habit of calling out random lyrics to whatever hip-hop or rap song happens to be playing on the clubhouse stereo. Then he launched into a little rap of his own.

"I'm just Derek Bell," Mr. Bell said. "I come to the ballpark every day, I go home, I walk the streets with all the crowds in New York. And in New York, if you have good rapport with the media, you talk to 'em when they wanna talk to you, you know what I'm saying? There ain't no problem. You gotta do your job, I gotta do mine. If I fuck up, you gotta do your job. You know, you read the paper, and it says, 'Derek Bell made an error, cost them the game.' They read it while they're eating breakfast, or while they're drinking their coffee, or while they're, you know, on the toilet taking a shit. And guess what? Next paper comes out the next day, and you did something good, you know what I'm saying, they're gonna get the next paper the next day, and they're gonna read that. If some guy's an asshole to reporters, and he don't relate to them, that's when you're gonna get on their bad side. You might write something bad, but that ain't gonna stop you from being my friend, you know what I'm saying? Why should I be an asshole to you guys when you write about how I did something wrong, if I did something wrong, and I admit it, you know? It doesn't bother me."

Much of the time, Mr. Bell lives on his 63-foot yacht, the Bell 14, which is docked between piers 59 and 60 at Chelsea Piers. It's a sleek, white Sea Ray with a Yamaha XL1200 jet ski strapped to the stern. As for other accessories: he wears a gold necklace with a giant gold pendant, studded with diamonds, shaped like home plate with a big, gold baseball jutting out from it.

He grew up in the tough Belmont Heights section of Tampa, Fla. He and Little League teammate Gary Sheffield-now a star for the Los Angeles Dodgers-worshipped Mr. Sheffield's uncle, ex-Mets pitching ace Dwight Gooden, who wore No. 16. Today, it's Mr. Bell's number. He came up with the Toronto Blue Jays, then played in San Diego before moving to Houston.

There are times, he said, when he finds himself walking around Manhattan, near the Doubletree hotel in Times Square where he lives when he's not on the Bell 14, when he forgets he's famous. He's tough to miss, with his baggy eyes and shaved head. When people turn to look at him, he turns, too, to see what everyone is looking at.

"You know, I step outside to go to McDonald's or something, go to Wendy's, and people look and say, 'Oh!'" he said, imitating someone doing a double take. "And then I turn around and look, and then I remember, 'Oh, damn!' Because, you know, I'm out there walking around right there with everyone, waiting for the light to change."

Back in the clubhouse, before the game, his teammates were trickling in. They saw him getting his coordination right and started getting in on the act. Pitcher Pat Mahomes grabbed one of Mr. Bell's suit jackets and tried it on over his T-shirt, and did a little dance. Outfielder Jon Nunnally joined in. Clutching a can of Mountain Dew, Mr. Bell danced across the clubhouse to pitcher John Franco's locker, where a knob on the wall controls the volume of the clubhouse music. He cranked it up and danced away. Mr. Franco turned it back down.

At his locker, Mr. Bell assembled his road-trip entertainment. Dressed in his uniform pants, spikes and no shirt, he sorted through his stack of electronic equipment: portable CD player, video game machines, battery recharger, headphones and dozens of double-A batteries.

"Don't fuck with me!" he sang out, in unison with the music.

He grabbed a stack of about two-dozen DVD movies, including There's Something About Mary , Bowfinger and The Thirteenth Floor . He shoved in a book of 200 CD's, about 150 Sony PlayStation video games and a stack of brand-new discs from the likes of R&B crooners Carl Thomas and Gerald Levert.

"This is just for the plane," he said, not looking up as he focused on fitting everything neatly into his suitcases.

Then it was time to get ready to play. In the game, a 12-inning heartbreaker that the Mets lost, 2-1, Mr. Bell walked four times, struck out once and grounded out to the shortstop. The clubhouse afterward was sober, but not glum. Mr. Bell sat in front of his locker massaging the alligator-skin shoes he had decided to wear on the plane.

"Everybody's upbeat," he said. "We're not disappointed at all, by no means. We couldn't have won all these games."

Then Mr. Bell stood up and prepared to hit the showers. "I gotta shave my head," he said.

The Toronto bash is the best-organized event I've ever attended; it's the most accessible to home, the devalued Canadian currency gives visitors good bargains, the staff is courteous and friendly, everyone speaks English, and with 319 films there are more movies than anyone can possibly see in nine days. No paparazzi, no pushing and shoving, no scandals, no rampant egos, no price-gouging greed, no moguls munching smelly cigars while knowing the price of all things and the value of nothing at all. Just movies. The projectors start running at 9 A.M., with world premieres from Russia, Brazil, Korea, China and even Jamaica, and end with "midnight madness," featuring everything from porno flicks to a brand-new Japanese Gamera redux.

If Cannes is a frenzied supermarket, Toronto is more like an endlessly tempting buffet, offering free samples to all. This year, 250,000 tickets were issued to 5,000 accredited people, including 750 members of the press–and that doesn't account for the public that used to clamor for tickets on a first-come, first-serve basis. This year the crushing demand for tickets was determined by lottery. Clearly, Toronto has exploded.

Some festivals have a focus (film writing, independents, marketing, movie stars, the New Asian cinema), but in Toronto, the only unifying theme is "Let's all get together and see some movies." It's a free-for-all that seems to be a magnet for stars. I spotted Robin Williams, Alec Baldwin, Elton John, Susan Sarandon, Meryl Streep, Nick Nolte, Jeff Bridges, singers Harry Connick Jr., Jewel and Céline Dion, Kim Basinger, Claudia Schiffer, Denzel Washington and Ed Harris.

Bruce Willis took over Planet Hollywood for a party of his own. Annette Bening missed her press conference after husband Warren Beatty announced she was pregnant with the couple's fourth child and unable to fly. "Don't look at me, I had nothing to do with it," said Kevin Spacey, her American Beauty co-star, who had such a blast he returned three days later just to join the throng as a member of the audience.

Mr. Williams' new film, a dismal mixture of Holocaust depression and self-conscious Borscht Belt humor called Jakob the Liar , was so poorly received that he declared he is taking a year's hiatus from films and returning to stand-up comedy. Nick Nolte, in a flowing kimono, lived up to his reputation as an aging stud. Listed as one of the worst-dressed men in the world in People magazine, he came out of his corner swinging. "I worked hard for that honor. I mean, People magazine has such high taste. I selected my own wardrobe for Toronto. Men's clothing is not only boring and colorless, it also restricts the private parts. Anything that lowers the sperm count is bad fashion."

Now if only we could get bad Nick Nolte movies off the screen. He was in Toronto with two stinkers: a rotten Alan Rudolph adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions and a yawning bore called Simpatico, based on a turgid Sam Shepard play of no consequence. Directed by newcomer Matthew Warchus, Simpatico is about two middle-aged con men (Mr. Nolte and Mr. Bridges) who are haunted by a decades-old racetrack scam involving a fixed race, pornographic pictures, the blackmailing of a racing commission official (Albert Finney) and a series of double-crosses that include Bridges' alcoholic wife (Sharon Stone, who ends the film by shooting a horse through the head in a heap of blood and bad acting). Ms. Stone, riding the crest of a new career after The Muse , did not join her colleagues in Toronto for this fiasco.

Sigourney Weaver, who fared much better in her new film, A Map of the World , took up the slack. Glamorous and bright, she said she's finished battling alien spiders. In her latest she plays a Wisconsin farm wife, mother and school nurse who is wrongfully accused of child abuse and sent to prison. For the role she actually spent some time behind bars. "I went through the whole booking process–fingerprinting, mug shots, everything," she said. "It was more dehumanizing than Alien . I think I'm ready for a drawing room comedy."

Every day brought a planeload of new arrivals, every night launched another drinkathon of vodka martinis stirred with raspberries (this year's official Toronto cocktail). For the opening night gala, the producers of Canadian director Atom ( The Sweet Hereafter ) Egoyan's new film, Felicia's Journey, staged a carnival for 4,000 guests on the playing field of the SkyDome, with games, circus clowns, fortune tellers, jugglers, balloons, a Ferris wheel and 196 gallons of l00-proof vodka.

The party was more fun than the movie, a dark and brooding tale of a pregnant Irish girl who travels to a bleak British mining town searching for the soldier who deserted her, and the eccentric chef (Bob Hoskins, endearingly sinister) who befriends her. Little does she know that the kindly, grandfatherly gourmand is really a psycho who has buried a series of troubled young nymphets in his rose garden while preparing lavish feasts from the recipes his dead mother kept on videotape. The film's creepy style is punctured by syrupy violins, and the pacing–so typical of the overrated director–is paralyzingly slow. The Canadians know how to stage film festivals, but they still don't know how to make films. Felicia's Journey , which will open soon in the U.S., is Julia Childs meets Norman Bates.

Armed with the festivalgoer's essential survival kit (aspirin, Kleenex, eyedrops, notebooks, gumdrops and Preparation H), I logged about five films a day, scarfing down tacos between screenings. In a small cinema tucked away between Cartier and the Christian Science Reading Room, I passed a riot protesting something intriguingly called Barenaked in America , which turned out to be a documentary about a rock band, but opted instead for the new Woody Allen film. Good thing, too, because Sweet and Lowdown is a joyous surprise–a splendid, endearing and brilliantly conceived confection that eschews the recent sourness of Woody's last two films, Celebrity and Deconstructing Harry , and restores his mantle of comic genius.

Sean Penn plays Emmett Ray, an obnoxious, egotistical jazz guitarist from the Depression era with a legendary status among

jazz historians and music scholars who reconstruct his brief career in a series of marvelous anecdotes in an attempt to profile the elusive musician for future archivists. A pimp and a thief whose favorite pastime is shooting rats in garbage dumps, Ray strikes up an unlikely romance with Hattie (delicious British actress Samantha Morton), a mute girl with a ravenous appetite, then he marries a poisonous debutante (Uma Thurman, looking like Eve Arden playing Auntie Mame) with a penchant for gangsters. Mr. Penn is absolutely first-rate as the flamboyant, pint-size, hard-drinking, irresponsible jerk-genius who worships Django Reinhardt. With his pencil mustache and tousled, floppy hair, he looks like Felix Bressart and all those other immigrant comics who played violinists and head waiters in the l940's. Bathed in the golden glow of nostalgia for the music and period, Sweet and Lowdown looks ravishing, thanks to Woody's new Chinese cinematographer Zhao ( Raise the Red Lantern ) Fei.

Another triumph was Anywhere but Here , a penetrating study of an unhappy teenager and her frustratingly unconventional mother who travel from Wisconsin to Beverly Hills in search of a new life. In a movie made up of moments that are precious, pure and truthful, Susan Sarandon is positively staggering as the irritatingly cheerful, bawdily dressed woman who can't relinquish the role of mother. And as wooden as she was in the dismal Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace fiasco, Natalie Portman is piercingly honest and touching as the child on the verge of adulthood who no longer wants the role of daughter.

Once in a blue moon an actress will travel to the very center of her inner self for a part and come back with something unique and terrifyingly real. This is certainly true of Ms. Sarandon in Anywhere but Here . She moves through the film with a blinding force

of energy, and finesses everything with a galvanizing strength. She is grounded and tensile and alive; it's a performance worthy of more praise than space allows me here. Sensitively and movingly directed by Wayne Wang, Anywhere but Here is a profoundly balanced and morally uplifting work for which I predict great things, including many nominations when Oscar season rolls around in the year 2000.

I was less impressed by Ang Lee's ponderous and lengthy Ride With the Devil , a pointless epic about the Civil War (now there's a hot topic) that saw many walkouts. But I can recommend Lasse Hallström's The Cider House Rules without reservation. Skillfully adapted by John Irving from his long-winded novel, it's a well-crafted, slightly old-fashioned (in the best sense) film featuring two terrific performances: Michael Caine in fine form as Larch, the compassionate, ether-addicted doctor in a bleak orphanage in Maine who performs illegal abortions; and Tobey ( The Ice Storm ) Maguire as Homer, the orphan nobody wants to adopt whom Larch raises from infancy and teaches life's most harrowing lessons.

Jane Alexander, Charlize Theron, Kate Nelligan, Paul Rudd, Kathy Baker and Delroy Lindo also make finely tuned contributions to The Cider House Rules , a rich film of low-key character studies centering on the central theme of a boy with a unique ability to touch the lives of others without ever knowing any love of his own. From the cheerless, Dickensian foundling home to the apple orchard where Homer applies the rules of life among the disenfranchised crop pickers in the cider house, this rapturous film captures New England's breathtaking autumnal splendor with sweetness and accuracy.

Another big, expensive premiere was Snow Falling on Cedars , an elaborate and magnificently photographed (if somewhat self-inflated) movie version of David Guterson's popular best seller about the internecine conflicts between white and Japanese neighbors that resurface in a murder trial nine years after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ethan Hawke, who raised more than a bit of ire in Toronto by knocking down pedestrians while Rollerblading from one cinema to the next, plays a disillusioned journalist who lost a limb to the Japanese in World War II and now finds himself covering the trial in which the Japanese girlfriend who jilted him is now married to the defendant. A complicated story is made even more confusing by jarring internal conflicts, hammering anvil choruses and close-ups of dead fish, intercut with an odd Japanese marriage ceremony in a concentration camp punctuated by a swing band vocalist singing "Moon Over Burma."

Director Scott Hicks' first film since the acclaimed Shine is an ambitious undertaking, played out against a mordant landscape of ice and rain on an island in the snowy Pacific Northwest where the sun rarely shines. There are first-rate performances by Max Von Sydow, Sam Shepard and Youki Kudoh (star of The Picture Bride ), but Snow Falling on Cedars is a daunting film to sit through–more a compilation of impressions, images and fragmented memories connecting past and present than a viewer-friendly entertainment.

Sandwiched somewhere between The Taste of Sunshine , an exhausting three-hour, multigenerational saga by Hungarian auteurist István Szabó about the lives of a Jewish brewing family in Hungary in which Ralph Fiennes plays three roles, replete with full-frontal nudity (conclusion: he's no babe magnet), and The Wisdom of Crocodiles , a lurid vampire melodrama directed by Hong Kong's Po Chih Leong with Jude Law as a romantic bloodsucker who seals his doom when he falls in love with a pretty structural engineer in present-day London, I found time to take in a nauseating (but astoundingly well-researched) documentary about John C. Holmes, better known as "Johnny Wadd," the porn star famous for his 13-inch appendage.

Johnny pimped his own 15-year-old mistress, worked as an informant for the L.A. Police Department, and ended up a suspect in a gangland slaughter that claimed the lives of four people before he died of AIDS in l988. (He was the basis for Mark Wahlberg's character in Boogie Nights .) I saw this little jewel at 9 A.M. in an art house where the day before they were showing Tales of Hoffman. It's dirty work, but somebody's gotta do it.

Heading out of town on the final day, a horde of fresh rabble was lining up for something called Tops & Bottoms , a documentary about the history of sadomasochism since the Middle Ages, and the party after–a bacchanal promising "three floors of fantastic fest-ishism! Cabaret Girls! Slave Boys! Free Spankings!" On a street corner one block away, the marquee of the Anglican Church offered a sermon called, ironically, "Free From Bondage!"

In Toronto, there really is something for everybody.

The parking lot was filled with yellow school buses, and the scoreboard periodically informed us of the presence of various synagogues and Jewish youth groups, of which there were many. They sang the Israeli national anthem before the first pitch and the two micks in Box 38K were the only people in the immediate area who didn't know the words. (We were preparing to regale spectators with a faux-Gaelic version of "A Soldier's Song," but we were informed that we were 24 hours ahead of schedule, as Irish Night was to take place the following evening.)

Ah, what a night for New York baseball! We were smack-dab in the middle of the Mets' annual international week, during which various representatives of the city's hyphenated American culture are congratulated, saluted, feted and pandered to, all in the cause of filling Shea Stadium. Before Jewish Night and Irish Night, there had been Asian Night and Hispanic Night–a little of new New York, and a little of old New York. On each occasion, well-placed spies report, the place was crawling with kids and their parents.

All of this can, and perhaps should, make for some wonderful satire. In the New York Post , a mysterious prognosticator identified as "Hondo" (whomever he or she is, let it be said that he or she is the author of the most hilarious column in New York and is deserving of an immense pay raise) made some politically incorrect remarks about Jewish Night's seventh-inning bris and a special Hangover Day giveaway that followed the salute to, um, one of the aforementioned groups.

Yes, there was a little too much schmaltz and blarney. At one point during Jewish Night, the scoreboard flashed the names of three players, one of whom, we were told, was Jewish. It was our assignment to play Guess the Jew. The answer was Shawn Greene of the Toronto Blue Jays. Who knew?

But if you managed to get past the pandering and took a look in the grandstands, you'd have a pretty good idea of what baseball ought to be, and, in fact, how the Mets–and not their more storied rivals in the Bronx–are trying to make it work.

The Mets' international night is a gimmick, all right, but it is a well-intentioned and even admirable gimmick. In celebrating the cultures of various ethnic groups, particularly African-American, Latino and Asian, the Mets essentially are recognizing that this is a city where the name Walter O'Malley means nothing anymore, except among some of the older attendees of Jewish and Irish nights. The Mets are a nonwhite team, a team of immigrants and native-born blacks, and their annual ethnic festival is a clumsy way of letting the city's immigrants and native-born blacks know that they're welcome at Shea Stadium, as welcome as the Jews and Irish and Italians and Poles who make up the team's old-line fan base.

What a contrast from the attitude of the Yankees' principal owner, George Steinbrenner. He is rather famous for his contempt for the neighborhood in which his team plays–the South Bronx–and those who live in it. For years, earnest sportswriters have lamented the Yankees' apparent unwillingness to recruit new fans from the vast Latino population around Yankee Stadium. Such naïve souls! Mr. Steinbrenner doesn't want such people in his stadium. In fact, as we know, he doesn't even want his stadium anymore.

When the Mets, who have been through some hard times of late, faced the Yankees earlier this year, the sporting press announced that no matter the outcome of the three-game series (the Yanks wound up winning two of the three), New York was and always will be a Yankee town. The Mets, the writers insisted with their sporting-press certainty, will forever be New York's other team.

Really? What about if the Dominicans of Washington Heights and the Colombians of Jackson Heights and the Koreans of Flushing–not to mention the Puerto Ricans of the South Bronx–decide to patronize the one team in New York that's making an effort to win them over? Sure, the Wall Street crowd will remain Yankee fans, especially if Mr. Steinbrenner gets his ball park on the West Side. But a good portion of the Wall Street crowd heads for points north and west after Yankee home games. They will not decide which team will rule New York. The fans in the subways will.

The Yankees are in the midst of a season to remember. Good for them. But the Mets, with their funny little gimmicks, are trying to win over the New York of the 21st century. Better for them.