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Like many good businessmen, Mets manager Davey Johnson relies on experience, instincts, and a personal computer.

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New York Mets manager Davey Johnson gnawed on a wad of chewing tobacco, contemplating what radio announcer Bob Murphy aptly described as "one of those war-of-nerve situations that a manager gets paid to manage for." One out in the bottom of the seventh on this late-June afternoon, and the Mets had already blown an early 6-I lead to the Phillies before rallying to tie against Philadelphia reliever Bill Campbell. Now they had the go-ahead run at second, and the crowd at Shea Stadium was screaming for more. With first base open and first place at stake, all eyes turned to the home dugout to see whom Johnson would send out to hit for his pitcher.

"It'll be interesting to watch Davey's move here," noted Murphy from his pressbox perch, thinking aloud as any knowledgeable fan might. "He's got [right-handed slugger] George Foster and [left-handed pinch-hitting wizard] Rusty Staub both in reserve, but Rusty hasn't had much success against Campbell, even though he's one of the better pinch-hitters in the league. Foster's the obvious homerun threat, but the Phillies could always walk him to pitch to Staub. You can almost hear the wheels turning in both dugouts." Or the faint hum of computers.

Down on the Phillies' bench, manager Paul Owens was shuffling through lineup cards and considering a variety of possibilities: If Foster came in and was pitched to, it meant the potential winning run was at the plate -- with a game-breaker in the batter's box; Staub was the better clutch hitter, but at .067 lifetime against Campbell, he was no historical favorite to do heavy damage. Either guy could be walked to get to the other, setting up the double play. And Owens had Jim Kern, another short reliever, warming up in the bullpen. Johnson, on the other hand, was squinting at the mound and pondering the inadequacy of certain statistics. Roughly 60 feet down the stadium tunnel, or about the distance from the pitcher's mound to home plate, sat his IBM PC/XT microcomputer, Johnson's so-called sixth coach, which he consults before each game.

One for fifteen, yeah, he thought, trying to visualize his printout on Staub vs. Campbell, but how many of those balls were hit hard? Where did they go, infield or outfield, right side or left side? Were there men on base? How many outs? Late innings or early innings? Night games or day games? Home or away? Was Staub playing hurt? Would Owens risk walking Foster:' Would Campbell have to pitch Staub too carefully? Is Rusty loose? Is he due today? Having no terminal to consult for an immediate answer, Johnson scratched his head and motioned for the right-hander.

Foster took four wide ones and trotted down to first. As the crowd buzzed with anticipation, the portly, 40-year-old Staub tossed aside his batting donut and settled into a semicrouch at the plate. Campbell glared in for the sign. "I regarded it," Johnson would later say of this second-guesser's smorgasbord, "as your classic 'unfavorable chance deviation.' " Staub regarded Campbell's first pitch as a meathigh fastball, and roped it to right for the game-winning RBI.

Hardball hunch meets personnel pool meets disk drive, produces line drive: "The media has a lot of fun with this computer thing," sighed Staub, child of another baseball era, in the warm Shea twilight of next day's batting practice, "but I think you can make too much of statistics. There's no substitute for baseball sense. David's no slave to the computer. Sometimes, I swear, I have no idea what he's doing."

What Johnson is doing is taking a small but highly visible business with only one tangible product to sell -- the performance of its people -- and managing it, using that most tangible of new business tools, the computer. Once the very symbol of baseball ineptness, the Mets have assumed an aura of slick proficiency by becoming the latest professional sports franchise to experiment with the computer as a major strategic weapon. Johnson's challenge: to integrate what the computer can tell him with what he already knows about the business of winning baseball games. Against a backdrop of pennant pandemonium, this is management at a technological crossroads.

In the beginning there was NFL football, with its high-tech approach to playerscouting and play-charting. Soon, the use of small but powerful computers entered the arenas of thoroughbred racing, international yacht racing, big-time road racing, professional basketball, and a host of other sporting industries. But baseball, perhaps the most number-driven of any major sport ("baseball," avers Toronto Blue Jays executive Paul Beeston, another recent computer convert, "is one big statistic"), has been slow, if not reluctant, to adapt. It is, after all, an industry dominated, from the front office to the playing field, by thinkers from baseball's past. The tradition of baseball, its shared knowledge and its shared strategy, is fundamentally an oral tradition, handed down from coach to player and league to league over succeeding generations. Pitch Schmidt up and in with men on base so he can't get his arms extended, but don 't try it at Wrigley Field, the "book" might say. Get anything you can off Carlton early because he gets stronger after the third. The wise manager filters baseball's folklore through knowledge of his own personnel and the vagaries of game conditions. Numbers are indicators, but only indicators.

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