DESPITE THE HOARY PROVERB, HISTORY NEVER REPEATS ITSELF BUT SOMEtimes the similarities are so startling as to lend credence to a popular fallacy.

Sixty years ago when sportswriter Herbert Simons founded BASEBALL DIGEST, which is now the sport's only monthly magazine, patriotic fervor was sweeping the United States in the aftermath of a sneak attack by an enemy. In 1942, as in the year 2002, the drums of war were reverberating and a president was urging Americans to steel themselves for an arduous campaign to smash the nation's foes.

Yet, George W. Bush in 2002 does not face the kind of adversaries and challenges following the attack on New York City's World Trade Center that confronted Franklin D. Roosevelt six decades earlier after the Pearl Harbor bombing. It's a much changed world. The gulf of time dividing the "War on Terrorism" and World War II is almost as great as the one between the latter and the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s.

America in the early 21st Century is far different in countless ways from what it was like in the first half of the 20th. Among other things, it's more than twice as populous with more than 285 million inhabitants as compared to 130 million. That multitude is also more culturally diverse given the vast influx of immigrants from lands that formerly sent few people to the United States.

Just as the nation has changed so has major league baseball in many ways whose cumulative effect almost escapes notice because modifications and alterations came singly not in battalions. The game has gone through a gradual evolution rather than a revolution but the over-all change has been major.

In fact, it would be no exaggeration to suggest that the "national pastime" is a whole new ballgame compared to what it was like in 1942.

That may wound the sensibilities of those so entranced by nostalgia and a romantic view of the game's mythology as to contend baseball is immutable. But to insist that Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Jason Giambi and Randy Johnson are playing the same game as their great predecessors of the 1940s, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Bob Feller, Mort Cooper and the rest, is sheer self-delusion.

Admitting to change doesn't require a value judgment, of course, as to whether baseball was better or worse in 1942 than it is today. There's no need to echo Hall of Famer Cap Anson's disdain for the way the game was being played two decades after he retired as Chicago Colts (Cubs) manager and first baseman in 1897.