SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic -- The starting pitcher wears his gun to the ballpark. Kids and players' friends watch games from the dugout. There are ankle-high weeds in deep center field. Vendors sell rum, balloons, corn on the cob. Balls disappear during batting practice. That is winter baseball.

The barefoot grounds crew lines the field by hand, scooping handfuls of lime from a rusty wheelbarrow. Security guards with clubs and pistols patrol the grass, but scores of kids still sneak in for free during the national anthem, when the guards snap to attention. That is winter baseball.

The first pitch is 10 or 15 minutes late. A bleacher seat is five pesos, about 40 cents. Latin dance music plays between half-innings, sometimes between at-bats. The outfield wall is made of cement. Warm nights, sudden showers and a three-day Christmas break. That is winter baseball.

It is four rowdy Latin coalitions where the game goes on between the end of the World Series and beginning of spring training: pro leagues in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, with teams of native sons in the major leagues and minors and a few Americans, mostly minor-leaguers.

In the Dominican Republic, so much about it is familiar. The five teams have longstanding traditions and fans. The players argue in English with American minor-league umpires, follow the same batting-practice routines, open their papers to box scores and batting averages. The game itself -- roughly Class AAA ball -- isn't that different.

But this is the Third World, and, in other ways, the game bears no resemblance to the American version. The stadiums are old and battered, the fields marked by rocks, trash and bad bounces. Attendance is down in Santo Domingo because so few fans own cars. There are guns in the clubhouses.

There has been a Dominican league for most of this century, and for decades it was a thriving fiefdom into which the country poured all of its love for baseball. The best Dominicans, such as Luis Tiant Sr., played alongside Negro League stars from the United States. Every game sold out.

But things are no longer the same. When Dominicans began playing in the majors after the dictator Gen. Rafael Trujillo was assassinated in 1961, suddenly fans had other, better teams for which to cheer. The home-grown stars of the past -- Rico Carty, Juan Marichal, Cesar Cedeno -- still played in the winter, but many today don't deign to play, unwilling to risk their astonishing major-league salaries.

As well, a collapse of the Dominican economy has cut deeply into the fan base. There are no team T-shirts or jackets for sale at the ballparks. No one has the money to buy them.

In a sense, though, the devastated economy keeps the league going. So many people have so few diversions. No television. No Nintendo. Not enough to eat. Their unallayed devotion to baseball demands that the games go on.

"Probably 70 percent of the country will either see this on TV, hear it on radio or read about it in the paper," said Eduardo Antun, co-owner of the Estrellas Orientales of San Pedro de Macoris, watching his team play Licey of Santo Domingo. "The league is different now, but people are still crazy for it."

A seedy stadium

Antun sat behind the plate in a rusted grandstand covered by a metal roof. Tall concrete bleachers ran down the foul lines. The outfield wall was covered with three decks of advertisements for liquor, soap and credit cards. Bulbs were out on the electric scoreboard. A hand-operated, out-of-town scoreboard gave the score, inning and number of current base runners in another game. A vague burning smell hung in the air.

There were 1,500 fans scattered around the 15,000-seat stadium, no more than 50 cars on the littered lot outside. Crowds are bigger in the country towns with teams -- Santiago, San Pedro and La Romana -- but this was an average night in Santo Domingo.

It began before sunset, with batting practice. The security guards let kids run among the players. Some helped, collecting balls. Some were more devilish.

"Balls are like gold to a kid playing in the street," said Baltimore Orioles first-base coach Greg Biagini, who managed Estrellas for two seasons. "My players always fought to be the first ones to hit in batting practice, because half the time we had to call it off early. All the balls were gone."

Some kids had gloves. "If you need someone to throw with, they're always around," said John Pulowski, a California Angels farmhand who has pitched three seasons for Estrellas. "They'll be 10 years old throwing you curveballs and sliders, and you start going, 'Hey, show me how you threw that.' "

The players gradually arrive. "We've been trying to get everyone here by 4:30, but we're still working on it," said Estrellas manager Nelson Norman, who played three seasons in the majors. "That just isn't emphasized as much here. It's a different culture."

Nothing drives that home more eloquently than watching players arrive with guns stuffed into their pockets. It is a common sight in the Dominican league.

"We've got seven or eight guys who carry guns," Pulowski said. "They say they need it for protection on the streets. I don't know. They never use them or anything, but they'll start fooling around with them and wrestling in the clubhouse, and all the Americans start going, 'Oooooh boy, get that thing out of here.'

"It takes getting used to. Like the clubhouse valuables box? In the States, guys put their wallets and watches and jewelry in there, and it's locked during the game. Here, they have the same thing, but when you go to get your wallet and watch after the game, you rifle through seven or eight guns. You just try to make sure they aren't pointing at you."

Gun-toting is a taboo subject for Latin players, because it can ruin a career in the States. But, here, no one blinks.

"Guys carry them because it's rough on the streets, and there are a lot of blackouts at night," said one native Estrellas player who asked not to be identified. "Some guys like to party late, and they want protection on the way home."

A familiar, punchless game

The evening became more familiar once the game began. American fans would have recognized the Orioles' Juan Bell and Los Angeles Dodgers' Jose Offerman playing for Licey and veteran Dion James at first base for Estrellas. Other identifiable names this winter are Junior Felix, Sammy Sosa, Nelson Liriano and Juan Guzman.

The game began nine minutes late, with the Orioles' Luis Mercedes hitting a sharp grounder to Bell at second base. The ball took a bad hop, hit Bell's right wrist and bounced away. A winter-ball error. Mercedes, leading the league in hitting at .340, was immediately picked off.

The game proceeded, scoreless.Vendors moved through the stands selling candy, liquor, beer for 50 cents, tiny shelled peanuts in small brown paper envelopes. A fan blew an ambulance siren whenever Licey did something right.

The guards stood by the dugouts watching the game, barely paying attention as a variety of people wandered in and out of the dugouts. Norman let an American reporter and photographer watch the game from the dugout. "No one blinks," Pulowski said. "We're used to seeing 10 people we don't know."

The scene in the stands was similarly lively. Dominican fans love to bet -- on anything. Whether a team will win. Whether a batter will get a hit. Whether a pitch will be a strike. Whether it will rain in the sixth inning. You can see money changing hands after every pitch.

The game was low-scoring, as most are. This is a league given up to pitchers. The parks are enormous, more than 400 feet to center and 330 to the corners, and combine that with old lights and dark balls -- they are oiled beforehand instead of rubbed with mud, and pick up dirt instantly -- and you have a hitter's nightmare.

"Trying to hit those bad boys can be brutal," said Estrellas outfielder Scott Meadows, an Orioles farmhand.

Mercedes was one of only three batters over .300 last week. The home-run leader -- it's jonrun in Spanish -- had four in 30 games.

Most games are long and slow, full of one-run innings, sacrifice bunts and conferences on the mound. On this night, Estrellas built a 3-0 lead, but Norman took out his starter in the sixth, and the bullpen was brutal. Pedro Borbon Jr. was one of three Estrellas relievers who contributed six walks -- seis transferencias -- as Licey scored four runs to move ahead.

A wrinkled old man on a unicycle passed around a hat after jumping rope and juggling balls during the seventh-inning stretch. Mercedes scored the tying run in the eighth in traditional winter-ball fashion: single, stolen base, single. The game went into extra innings.

When Bell bunted the winning run to third with one out in the 11th, the ambulance siren blew for the 100th time and Bell got a standing ovation. It was three minutes before midnight. Few fans, if any, had left.

In media, postmortems galore

As soon as the game ended, a half-dozen radio broadcasters jumped onto the field and began their live post-game shows. "There are 20 pre-game shows here, and maybe 10 post-game shows," Antun said. "Only one station carries the game, but the whole AM dial is baseball before and after."

Norman said: "They have all kinds of talk shows, and they'll rip every decision you make. You have to have thick skin to manage here. If you have 2,000 fans in the stands, you have 2,000 managers."

Up in the bare press box, reporters from the nine daily national newspapers cranked out their stories, some on old typewriters. There was grumbling about Norman's handling of his pitchers. Farther down the box, two TV sports anchors stared into banks of lights.

There is less media attention for games outside Santo Domingo: no television, only a couple of reporters. But it is in these places that you best come to understand the Dominican passion for baseball.

When the home team hits a homer in Santiago, fans circle the bases holding a coffin, signifying the death of the visitors. This winter in San Pedro, with Estrellas in first place, games are selling out. Fans blow air horns. After a recent home run, a man emerged from the stands, dusted the plate with feathers and sprinkled it with water from a dirty bottle.

"I think it was some voodoo guy," Meadows said. "I was up next, and the umpire was yelling at him, 'Get out of here, buddy!' No security guards came and got him. He just went back to his seat. And if he was blessing the plate, it didn't work. I popped out."

Strange tales abound

Such exotica isn't limited to the Dominican Republic.

"I played one winter in Venezuela," said Estrellas reliever Dale Polley, an Atlanta Braves minor-leaguer, "and it was an election year. Well, we're playing, and all of a sudden these glider planes come buzzing over the fence, six or seven maybe 30 feet off the ground, and drop thousands of leaflets on the field. It looked like it was snowing.

"Another time, we took a plane trip, and we're in this little town and the bus driver takes us to this little hut, and someone says, 'Well, here's the airport.' We're looking around like, 'Whaaaat?' But, sure enough, here comes some guy wobbling in over the VTC mountains. He landed, picked us up and took off."

Such is life in winter ball. Tommy Lasorda, who managed Licey years ago, tells a story about a pilot's leaving without his players because he was so mad that they lost a game. There is an old story about the lights going out when a visiting team was about to win a big game.

"Things will go on down here and you'll tell people back in the States, and they say, 'Go on, no way,' " Pulowski said. "But they happen. You just have to come see for yourself."

Pulowski, for instance, said this has been a good season for the electric company.

"Usually, by now we've had three or four blackouts," he said. "You'll be in the middle of an inning, and -- bam -- everything goes dark. The fans ball up some trash and start bonfires so they can see. You see that in the States all the time, right?"

What you do see is a similar level of love for the game.

"I just got back from Venezuela," said Milton Jamail, a University of Texas professor of Latin American studies, who has written a book about winter baseball, "and I sat with a crowd of 20,000 who waited five hours in the rain for a game to start."

Venezuela is the one place where winter ball is thriving. The league added two teams this year, and weekend crowds in Caracas exceed 20,000. There is a developmental league for young players that routinely attracts crowds as large as the best games draw in Mexico and Puerto Rico.

But it is not right to equate a lack of attendance with fan apathy.

"When I was growing up in Santo Domingo, I rooted for Licey every day, watched on TV, listened to radio, whatever, if I couldn't go to the games," said Mercedes. "It's still that way."

When Estrellas and Escogido of Santo Domingo met in the Dominican series in 1988, there was so much interest in San Pedro that fans lined the top of the outfield wall from foul line to foul line. Some crawled up the light towers.

"We came home with a 3-1 lead [in the series], and there were thousands of fans on the bridge into San Pedro, cheering the bus," said Carlos Bernhardt, the Orioles' scout in the Dominican Republic, who doubles as Estrellas' pitching coach. "Then we lost the last three games, and everyone was crying. People still talk about it."

Already everyone is gearing up for this year's playoffs, which begin next month after the 48-game regular season. Four of the five teams qualify for a round robin in which each team plays nine games. The top two advance to the Dominican series. The winner plays in the Caribbean series, which brings together the champions from the four winter leagues.

"The playoffs get crazy," Pulowski said. "But every day in winter ball is crazy. You learn to go with the flow. The other day we didn't know if we were playing a game the next day. Different people kept saying yes, no, yes, no. We had no clue. You learn to just roll with that stuff. After a while, it's kind of fun."

The Winter Game

* Tomorrow morning in The Sun: To Eduardo and Manuel Antun, owners of the Dominican League team Estrelles Orientales, no amount of gold would be betterthan a winter ball championship.

* Wednesday: Twelve players from San Pedro de Macoris, a city of 120,000 ( roughly the size of Carroll County) played at least one game in the major leagues in 1990. If the Baltimore area produced talent at the same rate, it would have 200 natives wearing major-league uniforms.

* Thursday: Rare is the resident of San Isidro, Puerto Rico, who doesn't know all about Leo Gomez, the local boy who made it to the big leagues as the Baltimore Orioles third baseman last season.