THE "Replace Divots" sign on the tee was unnecessary. There is, in the words of founding father Mark Schuster, "no turf degradation" in the game of balf.

Balf, the sport of the third millennium, as soothsayer Schuster calls it, combines baseball ("ba") and golf ("lf"). You swing a baseball bat at a golf ball that you have tossed up in the air. Just like when you were a kid. Or it was that way for the 38-year-old Schuster when he was a kid.

He grew up a baseball toss from the old Thornburg Golf Course (now Crafton Golf Club) on the west end of Pittsburgh. A creek separated his neighborhood from the course.

"Errant shots always landed in the creek or across on our side of the creek," Schuster recalls. "We would go down through the woods and pick up as many balls as we could find and go up on top of the hill and hit them with baseball bats.

"When you're 6, 7, 8 years old, to be able to hit something 100 yards out of your hands with a baseball bat -- it was a great feeling."

It is a sensation Schuster never lost. And one I had a hard time finding.

The bat, known as a clat (using the "cl" from "club" and "at" from "bat"), is shaped like a fungo, but has only a 10-inch barrel that measures two inches across. A bat with a putter head on the bottom, called a clutter, is used on the green.

Paired with Schuster's brother, Greg, and two other home-course boys -- Will Aston-Reese, now of Staten Island, N.Y., and Ken Ringel -- we tackled all 6,102 yards of Shannopin Country Club in the Ben Avon Heights north of the city in the second annual Clasters. No, the winner doesn't get a green jacket. And while The Masters offers legends such as Byron Nelson and Gene Sarazen for ceremonial first shots, The Clasters has the first ball dropped in by parachutists who then play away. And without any turf degradation. Well, except for a few guys who wore baseball cleats last year.

"I'm a golf pro. I don't know what to make of this," Shannopin assistant Eric Teasdale says about balf. "It's beyond my comprehension."

Outside the shop, 40 men and women are wielding Louisville Sluggers, yelling "three" instead of the standard "fore" when they pop foul or line drive their regulation golf ball into an adjoining fairway.

"But," Teasdale is saying, "as long as they're having fun -- that's what counts."

Swinging and missing is not a stroke until you have picked up three strikes on a hole. Par is a longshot because the best balf slugger cannot outhit the longest golf driver. John Daly is out of Albert Belle's sight.

I showed up wearing a Red Sox baseball shirt. During introductions, several people said, "Mo Vaughn?"

More like Moe Howard.

My 9 on our first hole, the 551-yard 10th, did win honors, however. I held the tee with a 5 at the 219-yard 11th. A clat wasn't tossed in anger until Ringel let fly at the sixth hole.

"Balf," Greg Schuster claimed on his way to a 118, the low round for our group and three strokes better than his inventor brother, "is a game of moral victories."

Balf is a game played by old baseball first basemen stretching to snag those glory days when they were boys of summer.

"It's a child's game," says Mark Schuster, who has his own company writing computer software. "Now that I'm 38, I'm winding down. I've played organized baseball and softball since I was 6. I was looking for a form of recreation where I could still go out and use my baseball talents.

"I can't golf worth a [darn]. I'm not going to go out and spend $1,000 for clubs. I have five kids, too. I don't have the time to learn. This is something that comes very easy."

The sport was born Christmas 1993 when, at Schuster's urging, a friend from Chicago lathed down a softball bat and put two aluminum plates on the bottom. Schuster returned to his Thornburg boyhood and snuck the clat onto the course. One smack of a golf ball and he drank in the past.

"That's when I really knew I had something," Schuster says. "I played five or six holes and I came close to parring a couple. I've never even parred a hole in golf. And I have played about 20 times. I thought, 'This is really neat.'"

He shared the idea with friends such as Aston-Reese, who sells mutual funds for a New York bank. Aston-Reese mentioned it in a conversation with a reporter from The Wall Street Journal. The Associated Press picked up on the story. Then came an interview with the BBC. The next thing Schuster knew, he was receiving calls from people requesting clats.

"I didn't know what to do," says Schuster, who even has his own home page (http://users.aol.com/ clatmaster/balf.htm). "I figured I needed mass production. I was surprised by the response.

"I called the president of Louisville Slugger. I said, 'This is going to sound insane.' I told him about the game and asked if I could have 15 minutes of his time to meet with him." Jack Hillerich took one look at Schuster's clat and stared. Schuster was starting to squirm. Either he was onto something or security was about to escort him from the building.

The next thing he knew, Hillerich had Schuster at a Louisville Slugger plant talking to engineers.

There also is constant refinement on a game in its infancy. Aston-Reese wants to rename greens "Lornes." After all, most players are thirtysomething crowding 40, graying, and flashing back to '60s TV.

"Hey," Aston-Reese would say after a nice approach shot, "you're on the Lorne."

Finding the Lorne is most difficult from 50 to 75 yards. There is no lofted clat. You find yourself check swinging or popping up or trying to bunt. You usually get several opportunities on each hole. It is not unheard of to be 50 yards out, then 70 yards over.

"I don't think you ever got the hang of the short game," says Pittsburgh's Tim Bannon, who won this year's Clasters with a 114. "That's something that's going to be really tough. I think my putting saved me. I told my partner, I think I'm going to throw one of these clats in my golf bag. It's top heavy. It had a nice pendulum swing to it."

The lure of balf, Mark Schuster says, is its inexpensiveness. A set of clats cost $80. Schuster never loses a ball. I cannot say the same, having sent three into truly foul territory. Aston-Reese offers another rule idea: Pop fouls caught by the clatter should not count as a stroke.

This game is clearly no walk in the park. The world record was a 103 by New Jerseyan Jim Christiano during the first Clasters. That figure made my inaugural 129 a little easier to swallow. I'm not used to three-digit scores on a golf course, but most balfers apparently are at home above the century mark. The 38-year-old Bannon says a good score with 14 clubs for him is to break 100.

"I do golf," he says. "I love golf. I'm just not a very good golfer. I'll tell you what -- if this catches on, I'll chuck my clubs and just play balf. It had all the fun of golf, but without the pressure and the thinking involved. You just get up there and whack it."

For people to catch balf fever, they will need a place to play. That is the challenge confronting Schuster now.

Shannopin, Woodlake CC in Lakewood, N.J. (site of the Eastern Regional), and North Links GC in Mankato, Minn. (Midwest Regional), are the only courses to host tournaments so far.

As Schuster likes to say, "Balf will be to golf courses what snowboarding was to ski resorts." Another source of revenue.

"Pick their slowest day of the week, whether it's Tuesday afternoons or Wednesday mornings or whatever, and let people do it," Schuster suggests. "It's a faster game, obviously."

Nine innings (or holes) of balf take less than two hours. A doubleheader can be played almost as quickly as it takes a single major league baseball game to be completed.

"I don't want to intrude," Schuster says, emphasizing that rule No. 1 of balf is "All the Rules of the course are to be strictly enforced."

"The people are well-behaved, too. I don't want them to be apprehensive about it being softball teams coming out and taking over the place."

There is, after all, no turf degradation.