Everything evolves, even the word `babe'.

Here's why it's OK to be gay in baseball: It's a new world every day. To be 35 years old today is to have been born in a time long, long ago. Now we have Will & Grace. We have MTV. We recognize, enjoy, learn from and profit by association with gay entertainers, teachers, journalists and politicians. Why not baseball players?

Certainly, the game's evolution is glacial. Connie Mack suggested the designated hitter 70 years before we saw the cursed tool. Four score and four years passed between the Emancipation Proclamation and Jackie Robinson's blessed arrival in Brooklyn.

But there will be a time, sooner than later, when a star baseball player drops into conversation the casual comment, "Sure, I'm gay, isn't everybody?"

We're getting there, incrementally and inevitably. The latest little step came from, of all places, a team's manager and its Hall of Fame-bound player.

The Mets' manager, Bobby Valentine, told Details magazine that baseball is ready for a gay player. Then, seconding the motion, catcher Mike Piazza said, "In this day and age, it would be irrelevant. If the guy is doing his job on the field ... I don't think there would be any problem at all."

Both men might be wrong about players' immediate tolerance of homosexuality; there's minimal tolerance of anything much more progressive than frat-boy behavior. As to why Valentine brought it up at all, there's speculation that his comments were part of a strategy preparing the public for a player's coming-out announcement. Come on, when did baseball ever have a plan for anything?

More likely, because Valentine is famous for leaving no thought unspoken, he simply said what he believed, that baseball is "probably ready for an openly gay player.... The players are a diverse enough group now that I think they could handle it." When a New York Post gossip columnist used those words as excuse to print a rumor of homosexuality about an unnamed player, Piazza, feeling named, called a press conference. There, while denying he was homosexual but expressing tolerance, Piazza moved the debate a step forward from the Out magazine episode of a year ago.