HERE COMES THE SUN.(spring training baseball fans)(Column)

With Opening Day gone by, a visitor to the recent spring-training camps can expect to keep no more than a handful of memories of the short season, such as a low line-drive homer in Tampa by the Yankees' new import, Hideki Matsui, intensely annotated by a horde of visiting Japanese media; or a Mo Vaughn sailer at Port St. Lucie, over the right-field fence and into a sandpit, where it was excavated by an exclaiming pack of boy archeologists; or Renee Conley's birthday party in Lower Box 105, Row D, at Scottsdale Stadium, in Arizona. Renee and four slender, well-tanned friends of hers--Laura McDermott, Angie Ray, Angie Cronk, and Ann Chaillie--were dressed in jeans, tank tops, and a scattering of forward-facing baseball caps, and their occupation of this sector, close behind the backstop screen, a bit over toward the visiting-team dugout, brightened the afternoon almost as much as the sun, which had been hiding behind chilly rain clouds for the past couple of days. The women put out the news that this was Renee's twenty-first birthday, and Renee, bowing and blushing a little--she had cropped dark hair and a nice strong nose--accepted the good wishes of the old fans and kid fans around her but then said, well, no, she was thirty-one today. This seemed to put her about in the middle, agewise, in her bunch, who turned out to be servers from the nearby Bandera restaurant. "The best margaritas in town,"said Laura, who is a bartender there. "Only don't go today, because all the staff will be rookies."

The game began--the Giants were hosting a split squad of Seattle Mariners--but the young women were distracted by party-favor comical cardboard eyeglasses, with a jagged "Happy Birthday"in exuberant colors above the frames. Putting these on could be done only by reversing the caps, and once this was done, to cascades of laughter, it was time for a round of Bud Lights and the first of a dozen or so group shots, with the girls hugging up in a tight bunch and showing their perfect teeth to each helpful, "cheese”-urging neighbor fan wielding a borrowed camera. Fan parties can turn into a royal pain if you're there for the game, but, c'mon, this was spring training, and it was a kick to see how rarely this part of Row D ever actually looked at the field.

By the time the women had slipped on pacifier-size candy rings (more snaps), you began to pick up some of the conversations and sort out the principals. Angie Ray had serious crimson lipstick and wore a cap with "Alien Workshop"over the peak, while Laura's cap said "Lucky Brand"in script astern. Angie Cronk was the one with a cluster of small silver rings in her right ear and a lavender silk scarf fashionably twisted around her short, white-blond hair. She looked a bit like Jean Seberg. One of her friends said, "Angie, your ring matches everything--God, you ...