SEVENSES:

You smell hot dogs and beer. You feel the anticipation. Men sport bright caps with fancy insignias. Women wear shiny team jackets two sizes too large. Kids struggle with long leather mitts. They hand over their tickets and enter the arena and start to search, not for a seat, but for history, for second-hand iconography, for dusty slices of immortality, for Number 7.

The Baseball Memorabilia Show has converted the fourth floor of the Claridge Hotel and Casino in AC into an American archeological dig. Antiquarians from California and Florida and most place in between are here to unearth rare fossils and sentimental artifacts. Walls are lined with the hieroglyphics of the sport: pennants and posters. Tables are stacked with faded baseball cards and assorted souvenirs, a Philadelphia A's ashtray, a Pete Rose parka. Living relics, Whitey Ford and Duke Snider and Billy Martin, are here for atmosphere, an occasional autograph and to have their memories tested by fans who possess baseball encyclopedias for brains.

It doesn't take long to realize that the greatest number and most treasured antiques revolved around one particular player. His face is everywhere, his signature on everything.  His is the King Tut of Hardball. He is down the long hall now, in a private room, confronted by an endless stream of supplicants.

Mickey Mantle sits behind a wooden table surrounded by sentinels who keep the crowds moving and the communions brief. Hundreds file by, quietly, respectfully, as if in a religious procession. They are relieved to find their hero has retained his dignity, his diffidence, and his hairline. Under a maroon sweater, his shoulders are still massive, his demeanor still regal. He will rarely look up to see the faces of the pilgrims who have journeyed so far and waited so long for his cursive blessing. Few will dare a conversation. They must be content to present their offering and watch the man who stroked 536 home runs now drag a felt-tipped pen across their memories.

He will write "Mickey Mantle" quite legibly, somewhat delicately, on baseballs and bubble-gum cards and paperback books and Little League uniforms and old Life magazines and ticket stubs and mugs and Polaroids with his mug and body casts and naked skin and anything that will hold ink. He will write Mickey Mantle 200 times this afternoon, and then he will do it again tomorrow.

"It's exhausting, but I don't really mind," says the autographer. "It's just this tension in the air. I want everyone to be happy. Especially when it's in my place, in the hotel that pays me. I have to be careful about the time. If you stop and personalize every autograph and talk to everyone, there's gonna be a lot pf people real mad. So my main goal is just to get everyone through the line at least once. When these people leave here, if they don't get what they came for, they're gonna blame me. Not Whitey or Billy, but Mickey Mantle."

"It's like it's happening to someone else. Like this Mickey Mantle is some other guy."

Neither sullen nor charming, Mantle signs beyond his two-hour allotment. He is so dedicated, so diligent that one wonders if signing his name isn't a form of penitence.

"I saw Mantle push kids aside," writes a former teammate. "He closed bus windows on a bunch of kids who wanted his autograph. He refused to sign baseball in the clubhouse before games. Everybody had to sign except Mantle.  There are thousands of baseballs around the country that have been signed not by Mickey Mantle but by Pete Previte, the clubhouse attendant."

There will be no autograph pinch-hitters today. Mantle earns a living by signing his name for $5,000 per appearance. Each time he comes to the Claridge Hotel, boxes of baseballs await him. And when he walks into a restaurant, men, women, and children too young to have seen number 7 roam centerfield for the Yankees will ask him to sign his name.

"It's been amazing how good my name has been," says Mickey Mantle with more wonderment than hubris. "I guess people think of Jack Armstrong when they think of me. This is the biggest year of my life. I'm more popular now than ever. I've been real lucky. Lucky to have played with the Yankees.  Lucky my appearance hasn't changed over the years.  Lucky my name is Mickey Mantle. It's easy to remember. You know, I haven't played ball in over 15 years. Long time."

Later, under less stress, Mantle tells of strangers who hug him on street corners and weep; of people who send him scrapbooks--he has over 50--that document every event of his life; of a woman who paid him $3,500 to attend her husband's birthday party; of throngs that grow unruly at the sight of him. Mantle is befuddled and bemused. He calls it "very strange" to have affected so many people he's never met, to be so admired for acts he can no longer perform.  Signing autographs is one thing, but the clipping and the awe and the tears....

"It's like it's happening to someone else," he says. "Like this Mickey Mantle is some other guy."

Sometimes, it must feel as if it's the other guy who has all the luck. Tom Catal doesn't operate on luck. "Mickey Mantle guarantees success," says the stockbroker-turned-memorabilia organizer. "I've been doing these shows for five years, and every year, he gets more popular. In Detroit, he almost caused a riot. Same thing in Kansas City. Mickey Mantle can outdraw God.  By 50 percent. I've tried to figure out the appeal, and all I can come up with is he's white, he's a living legend, and I will never do another show without Mickey Mantle."

Four dollars gets one autograph by Hall of Famers Duke Snider or Harmon Killebrew. Six dollars buys a Willie Mays or Pete Rose. Mickey Mantle goes for seven simoleons. Who would have guessed that the number of his back would end up his price?

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