Bill Conlin: Utley perfect in 3-hole, so naturally. . .

W

HEN I'M King of the World . . .

A luxury wing will be built at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown to honor the game's most special breed of batsman: The No. 3 hitter . . . It will pay homage to the great athletes who hit with power and for high average. A majority of them also were above-average runners and defenders. They represent the highest evolution of the baseball art. Their names are the stuff of legend.

A luxury wing will be built at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown to honor the game's most special breed of batsman: The No. 3 hitter . . . It will pay homage to the great athletes who hit with power and for high average. A majority of them also were above-average runners and defenders. They represent the highest evolution of the baseball art. Their names are the stuff of legend.

Visit the Ritz Carlton Three Hole Resort and you will have answered the question: "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" Joe will be flanked by Babe Ruth (who could flat fly when he was young, before becoming addicted to lager and hot dogs) and Willie Mays. Mickey Mantle's exhibit will be close by. Rub elbows with the deeds of Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Frank Robinson, Henry Aaron, Rogers Hornsby, Reggie Jackson, George Brett, Mike Schmidt, Roberto Clemente. They are just a notable few. Many members of this exclusive club were moved down a notch or two to No. 4 or 5 as their speed declined or a younger No. 3 came into their lineup. But few were moved out of the spot reserved for a team's best all-around hitter on a manager's whim. None I can think of were moved behind one of the five slowest runners in the big leagues so a rival manager would be more inclined to give the home-run hitter better pitches to hit.

Babe Ruth or Ted Williams could have batted anywhere from No. 1 to No. 6 and they still would have been pitched around. Can you picture Willie Mays being moved behind Willie McCovey so Stretch would get better pitches? Imagine Roberto Clemente being moved behind Willie Stargell and settling for a double on a certain RBI triple because the Pirates' hulking slugger had to be held at third.

So that's what will end Charlie Manuel's bizarre lineup flip, a move performed with a month of squandered experiment time behind the Phillies - a clutched straw. Chase Utley is as pure a No. 3 hitter as the Phillies have ever had - average, power, speed. Now Ryan Howard, born for cleanup duty, bats No. 3 in front of Utley. He will steal triples and runs batted in from

Utley with his station-to-station gait. Howard getting clipped by Utley's ground-ball tracer Monday is just the beginning of a clinic on why the best all-around hitter on a baseball team traditionally, and logically, bats No. 3. There remain some dedicated contrarians, however, who hold that the best hitter should lead off, thus getting the most at-bats over the course of a game and a season.

When I'm King of the World . . .

There will be a Slingbox attached to every cable box and a high-speed router sending Wi-Fi to every laptop . . . I am a degenerate techo-geek, as you should know by now. I want to be buried under a digital blanket of 0s and 1s. I want my soul to go to Cyber-Heaven, where there no crashes, blue screens of death or hard-drive eating worms. I want every human to be able to connect a Slingbox-loaded laptop to the PC input of a flat-screen LCD TV in Largo, Fla., or Honolulu or New Delhi and watch their hometown team on Opening Day no matter where they are in the world. I sat in Largo and watched the Phillies' home opener on Channel 3 in Philly.

I don't like to pimp for Bud Selig and MLB, not with the fan-unfriendly hatchet job they are doing by withholding the Extra Innings package from cable systems in an ongoing Dish vs. Box war that holds hundreds of thousands of baseball fans hostage. But . . . MLB.com's Mosaic feature on the MLB.TV Premium package is about as cool as not being there gets. You access a menu of all games in progress above a screen showing the game of your choice. There are streaming alerts in a box to the left. A running box score is on the right. Click Stats and you get all the relevant updated numbers. Go full screen at any time. With a mouse click, you can move seamlessly from game to game, alerted by the prompts. You watch Seattle's Felix Hernandez blow away Oakland's patient hitters with as dominant an Opening Day start by a 20-year-old since the days of Bob Feller. In a few days, Mosaic will permit you to select a number of your favorite players - fantasy league heaven - and be alerted when each of them comes to bat or comes in to pitch. *

Send e-mail to bill1chair@aol.com. For recent columns, go to http://go.philly.com/conlin.