But they might as well have claimed they'd seen the Loch Ness Monster, because what they saw, with their own eyes, never happened.

At least it wasn't only them. On July 7, 1961, a whole bunch of people in Baltimore could have sworn they watched those two Babe Ruth chasers, Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle, hit home runs in the same game against the Orioles. But as far as baseball is concerned, those homers never happened, either.

Then again, there were real eyewitnesses who saw the Babe hit a 61st home run in 1927, who saw Junior Griffey hit a 50th home run in 1996, who saw Al Kaline hit one out on June 1, 1958 that would have given him 400 career homers instead of 399.

But don't check your local record books. Baseball says those home runs were never hit, either.

Now, no other sport we know of could make thousands of people hallucinate at once like this. But in baseball, all it takes is one wave of the rule book -- and presto: All kinds of things disappear.

How? Simple. A little rain is how.

All of that stuff above never happened -- at least not "officially" -- because all those games were rained out. So even though the players thought they happened and the umpires thought they happened and the fans thought they happened, they didn't happen. The rule book says so. At least the major-league rule book says so.

So isn't it time to ask the question: Does this make any sense at all?

"Regis Philbin should do a show -- 'Is that your final answer?' -- on trying to explain the baseball rule book," says Gene Orza, associate general counsel of the players association. "He could give the situation ... Is the batter really out? ... Is that game really suspended? ... Is that your final answer? He could do a whole series of 'Who Wants to Be a Gazillionaire' on this. And nobody would ever win."

Of course, they wouldn't. Because here in the year 2000, people think logically. When they wrote some of these rules of baseball a century ago, the mound was 50 feet from the plate and the gloves looked more like automobile tires -- except there were no automobiles yet. So logic worked a little different than it does nowadays.

But we love our traditions in baseball -- whether they make any sense or not. So we might change a rule here or there: the DH rule, the height of the mound, what constitutes a save, that sort of thing. But those changes have to be the result of some big-time public clamor, if not a Congressional subcommittee investigation.

So it might seem like a logical idea to most people that EVERYTHING that happens on a field ought to count -- and in case of rain, you could just suspend these games and pick them up later. But come on now. How could baseball possibly change to a rule that logical?

"I've heard this argument for 50 years," Bud Selig says. "And the feeling in the major leagues has always been, we don't want to change the rule."

Well, maybe the people who have that feeling ought to ask the Tigers. Thanks to this rule "nobody" wants changed, they saw a 5-0 lead over the Indians get literally washed down the drain last Thursday -- nine days after the same thing happened to a 3-0 lead in Kansas City.

Or maybe these people should ask Luis Polonia. The diminutive Tigers leadoff man went 5-for-5 in those two games -- and had NONE of those five hits count.

Or then again, perhaps these people should ask some other professional baseball league that doesn't go by this rule. Let's see now. That would be, well, ALL of them.

Yes, EVERY minor league now uses a better rule: Whenever the game is halted, it is later picked up from that point -- whether it's an "official" game at that point or not.

The minor leagues caught on to the logic in this 20 years ago. So the ONLY leagues still holding on to the old rule are the major leagues. Naturally.

We'll concede that the minor leagues did have other considerations that don't apply to the big leagues -- such as a shorter season and an attempt to keep young pitchers from getting overloaded with doubleheaders as much as possible.

But the most compelling reason they changed their rule was this: It made sense.

"The thinking is, if it takes place on the field, it actually happened, instead of pretending it didn't happen," says Jim Ferguson, the former longtime public-relations director for the Reds who now serves as a spokesman for the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues. "I don't know of anybody who doesn't like the rule. It just seems to make sense. If you're playing, you really did play."

Whoa. What a concept. And a side benefit, Ferguson says, is this: "You do away with stalling. There's no benefit, if a storm is coming, to try to stall just because you're trailing 8-0 in the fourth inning."

In the minor leagues, if a game is suspended, it's normally just resumed the next time the two teams play each other, whenever or wherever that might be, even if it's in the ballpark of the visiting team. Orza wonders how that would work in the big leagues -- whether the Yankees, for instance, would be forced to finish the final game of the season, even if it cost them an off-day before the playoffs.

But Tim Brunswick, director of baseball operations for the National Association, says the minor leagues use a simple rule of thumb: If it has a bearing on the playoffs, you finish the game. And if it's a game that doesn't affect the playoffs, it's considered a rainout.

So we've got all kinds of logic flowing here -- everywhere but in the big leagues.

And this isn't the only rainout rule that evades our thinking. Remember opening day in Cincinnati? It was a day 50,000 people came from all over creation to take in Ken Griffey Jr.'s first game as a Red. But what did they see? They're still not sure. The game got rained out in the sixth inning with the score tied 3-3. And since that game WAS official, all the stats counted. But rather than resume it from that point, the Reds and Brewers were forced to start over the next day. Huh?

"Why play a seven-inning game where the statistics count and then have to replay the entire game?" Orza wonders. "That's like playing a 16-inning game to determine who won, only the first seven innings didn't count. That makes no sense at all."

What makes even less sense is that some tie games ARE suspended and picked up where they left off -- but only if the visiting team has just tied the score in the top half of an inning and the home team hasn't completed its at-bat in the bottom of the inning. We ask again: Huh?

"I wrote a memorandum to Major League Baseball on tie games," Orza says. "And in the memorandum, I wrote, 'I'm in search of a person who understands this.' "

But the minor leagues don't use that rule, either. ALL tie games are considered suspended games and resumed from the time they were stopped.

"I don't see any difference," Ferguson says. "Say the Phillies are playing the Reds, and the Phillies score in the top of the sixth to tie the game. Then it's a suspended game. But if it's tied going into the sixth inning and the game is stopped at the same point . . . they start over from zero. That doesn't make sense to me. What's the difference between those two games?"

Oh, there IS a subtle difference. But the bottom line is, you can have two games stopped at the same point in the same inning with the same score -- and one gets resumed, the other is started over. One more time now: Huh?

So can't we please change these rules? We're not asking to move the bases back five feet. We're not asking to go to two strikes and you're out. All we're asking for is one thing: common sense.

"You're right," Selig says. "This makes great sense. So it's something I suppose we ought to take a look at again. But I've heard this debate for five decades, and it's never been something anyone thought we should change."

OK, this is your final chance. All together now: Huh?