This is going to sound like something out of Volume VII of The Crank Diaries, but does it seem like more and more major-league hitters are coming to home plate wearing a batting helmet that looks as though it survived the seige of Fallujah?

	David J. Phillip, Associated Press Craig Biggio's helmet: Means of protection or a relic from the Argonne Forest? Click photo for larger image.

Helmets with the team's logo all but indistinguishable behind a crusty film of pine tar, dirt, tobacco spittle, baseline chalk, sweat, and I don't want to know what else are suddenly too evident for my taste, and though that shouldn't effect a single particle of anyone's existence, a spike in ugly headgear is starting to get under the thick skin of baseball traditionalists elsewhere as well.

Anaheim Angels manager Mike Scioscia, a former big-league catcher whose gritty style had the kind of legitimacy that allowed him to block the plate better than a Jersey barrier, recently took a long look at the pine tar-lathered helmet being worn by Angels masher Vladimir Guerrero and said, "If he ever gets hit with a pitch there, the ball will stick."

Guerrero's helmet, well back into his days with Montreal, has always looked like it was extracted from a pizza oven 10 minutes after the timer went off. It's blackened and bubbly. But Bad Vlad probably is far from the worst offender. Craig Biggio's battered Astros helmet has long had more the look of a World War I infantry piece than something that ought to be brought to the breezy disagreements that will determine the fate of the National League Central.

Philadelphia's Jim Thome and Houston's Lance Berkman are notable offenders as well, and maybe none of this would bother me if John Madden, demonstrating the kind of acute football analysis that brings him some $8 million per season, had not explained in detail once that Hall of Fame receiver Jerry Rice polishes his helmet before every game.

Rice apparently thought that looking supremely professional at all times created a standard that helped fuel his performance, which is a quaint notion but one that is still enforced by the NFL, where uniform code violations of even minute degree are dealt with harshly.

Though it doesn't appear to matter to anyone, Major League Baseball also maintains a uniform code that is part of the collective bargaining agreement with the players' union. There is no language relative to the helmet beyond the requirement that it carry the official MLB logo and the admonition that it carry no advertising, but a spokesman for the Commissioner's Office said Friday that baseball expects uniforms to be in "pristine" condition.

If you look up pristine in the dictionary, you won't see a picture of Thome's helmet.

"We don't really clean them," Pirates equipment manager Roger Wilson was saying as the weekend series against the Florida Marlins started. "I know the Mets clean them before every game, but whether that's some kind of management edict, I don't know.

"We wipe them down once in a while, particularly on the inside."

I wondered if his staff had directions from any player not to clean them.

"No," he said, "but if guys saw me cleaning them, they probably would say something."

Baseball players, you might have heard, are a superstitious breed, much like hockey players, poker players, horse players, and my grandmother, who would not allow anyone but a dark-haired man to be the first person through her threshhold in the New Year. I don't know what she'd have said about a dark-haired man wearing Craig Biggio's batting helmet. The point is, in baseball, once a guy gets his first two-hit game, he starts looking for all kinds of reasons to preserve the karma, and he's not about to clean the luck off his helmet.

But once your helmet gets to the point where it can be declared a biohazard, you might want to rethink that.

"The worst one I've ever seen was in Puerto Rico last week," Wilson said. "That Orlando Cabrera kid has so much pine tar on it; it was bad."

"Right," said assistant equipment man Bones Bonnett, "that thing glistened."

It's not like most major-leaguers love dirt and grime. It takes them about one second to call time out when they slide into second so they can wipe the dirt from their uniforms, which is why I think the whole bad-helmet thing represents a certain degree of posturing.

It says, "Look, I'm playing the game the way it ought to be played, hustling, sliding, sacrificing myself because it's the only way I know; I'm down and dirty, a throwback, and I don't care much for appearances because I'm just not that way.

"And, of course, as soon as this is over I'm going right back to the Ritz-Carlton."

For their part, the Pirates don't have an obvious offender of the "pristine" guideline regarding helmets. Craig Wilson's looks a little grimy, but it isn't conspicuous.

"I gave Craig's a good cleaning in spring training once," Wilson said. "I don't think he liked it."