PURE PLEASURE.

Baseball joy can be fleeting--just ask George Steinbrenner--but there's a lot of it around in May. Just now, the Cubs, under their new manager, Dusty Baker, are in first place in their division; the Red Sox hang a bare three games behind the Yankees, in spite of the Bombers' early 18-3 bolt from the blocks, the best start in franchise history; and the Kansas City Royals--the Royals?--are undefeated at home and are on top of the American League Central. For all that, the surest way to search joy out might begin at the corner of Second and Market Streets, in downtown San Francisco, where you can catch a glimpse of Pacific Bell Park's low bricky fa?ade, there by the edge of the Bay, an easy downhill fifteen minutes away. Let's walk. The Giants are in first place, too, but their inbound fans today are also warmed by the conviction that their three-year-old landmark has become the best address in baseball: a place where the game and the celebration of the game have found convergence. Outside, Pac Bell has the utilitarian, semi-shabby air of a bygone urban ballyard. It is squeezed onto thirteen acres, a small footprint in this era of parking-lot palazzos, and presents the quirky angles and back-alley vistas of a playground stuffed down inside some old city geography. All this is deliberate, for Pac Bell was modelled from the fanly visions of the president, Peter A. Magowan, a former Safeway C.E.O., who grew up in New York. (The back of this year's Giants Media Guide bears a full-page photograph of the curving, beflagged entrance to Ebbets Field, under the message "Cathedral.”) This place is trafficky and noisy, too, with streetcars way outnumbering the limos. Water is near, you sense, but you won't find it until you join the crowds pouring in from MoMo's bar, across King Street. Go with them past O'Doul Gate and along an unexpected walkway and suddenly the scents and sights and fresh breezes of the Bay are in your face. To the left, there's a brick wall with curved classic arcades and, up on top, fans walking to and fro. If you step inside one of the shaded openings and up to a chain-link fence, you're in right field, or just behind it, with the thick grass stretching away toward home and the dugouts and the curve and rise of the stands. You can stay here all day if you want--it's free--and without much company until Barry Bonds, tiny only from here, steps up to bat again.

For local fans, pride in Pac Bell also includes a smug knowledge that the price tag for all this, three hundred and sixty million dollars, has been borne by Magowan and a consortium of partners, and not by the city. Not by the fans, that is, who rejected such an idea in several referendums, and brought about baseball's first privately financed ballpark since 1962. There is a sense, too, that the fans must have had a hand in the building as well. ...