STOP GRIPING. WATCH THE GAME CONFESSIONS OF A BASEBALL PURIST What's Right--and Wrong--with Baseball, as Seen from the Best Seat in the House By Jon Miller with Mark Hyman Simon & Schuster 269pp $24 Play-by-play announcer Jon Miller has no shortage of baseball opinions. -- Bud Selig, owner of the Milwaukee Brewers and acting commissioner of Major League Baseball, is too big a wimp to be commissioner. -- Wayne Huizenga, whose Florida Marlins won the 1997 World Series, has done baseball more harm than good. -- Radical realignment of the leagues is a bad idea. -- People ought to stop criticizing baseball and watch the game. In Confessions of a Baseball Purist, written with frequent BUSINESS WEEK contributing writer Mark Hyman, Miller shares his insights into what's right and wrong with the game. Along the way, he serves up a string of anecdotes collected since he began calling games for the Oakland Athletics at the age of 22. He recalls how Charles O. Finley, who owned the A's in the 1970s, once was dining with friends in a fancy Chicago restaurant. So his pals could hear the radio broadcast of an A's game being played on the Coast, Finley had a speakerphone set up at his table. At one point, he ordered another phone, called the guy who ran the scoreboard in Oakland, and ordered him to flash ''Go'' if shortstop Campy Campaneris got on base. When Campy singled, Finley's guests heard the crowd chant: ''Go! Go! Go!'' That excited Finley, Miller and Hyman write. ''Do you hear that?'' they quote him as saying. ''I'm two thousand miles away having dinner in Chicago, and I just made fifteen thousand people at the Oakland Coliseum all start shouting, 'Go!''' But there is more to the book than laughs and musing about why Cal Ripken rarely catches a cold. Miller, currently the voice of the San Francisco Giants and ESPN Sunday Night Baseball, gets serious about the need for a commissioner independent of the owners. ''Right now,'' he says, ''baseball is a nation without a president. It's a free-for-all, a power grab among various quarreling constituencies.'' Not that there is anything wrong with the game. Miller emphatically argues that, far from dying a slow death, baseball is booming. He says that paid attendance per game last year was the second-highest in history for a full season. Besides, Miller says, baseball is producing incredible revenues: $2 billion in 1997. If there's a problem, Miller notes, it's ''how the owners share those revenues with one another, and how they divvy them up with the players.'' Still, he contends, the 1990s will someday be called the golden age of baseball. BY BUSINESS WEEK WRITERS RELATED ITEMS PHOTO: Cover, ``Confessions of a Baseball Purist''

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