Baseball fans -- and especially statistical mavens -- love to debate the date from which baseball's "modern era" ought to be reckoned.

By "modern era," of course, those same fans often mean different things. Some define the term to include only events they personally remember, or which were affected by the same conditions (like free agency) that affect baseball today. To those fans, records set by Stan Musial, for instance, are not "modern."

Others date the "modern age" to the formation of the present major league structure, generally 1901. And some, the hard core purists, insist the search for a "modern" era is pointless: that the baseball of 1876 ought to be considered equally with the baseball of 1993. Perhaps the most logical case for a "modern era," a point beyond which records ought to be considered as fairly and evenly achieved, it is 1893. That was the season of the last fundamental change in the game's rules, the relocation of the pitcher. Prior to that season, pitches had been delivered from a box 55 feet distant from home plate. In 1893, the now-familiar "mound" was built featuring a "rubber" 60 feet, six inches away. Granted, if your great-great granddad returned from an 1893 contest to watch a ballgame today, he might puzzle over the DH, he might wonder why the grass doesn't grow, and he'd probably be baffled how you moved the whole show indoors. But he'd recognize it as baseball.

ELSEWHERE ON THE FIELD

Ban Johnson, a Cincinnati sports writer, is named President of the Western League, a moribund minor league that will become the American League.

New York shortstop George Davis. who will later that year have a 33-game batting streak, homers and triples in the same inning against Chicago.

IN THE WORLD

The most serious stock market crash in 60 years precipitates a four-year depression.