Scorecard

A wiry man with dark, intense eyes, Plaatjes has spent most of his 30 years as an outsider. He is of mixed racial background, so under apartheid he was classified as "colored." This meant that he was permitted to have little contact with either whites or blacks. "They isolated us," he says. "We had our own buses, our own schools, even our own exams."

South Africa was under a state of emergency when Plaatjes and his wife, Shirley, came to the U.S. in January 1988 for a three-week vacation. They planned to return, but then they thought about their daughter, Gen�, now seven. "We didn't want her to grow up under those conditions," says Plaatjes, who was granted asylum because he is a physical therapist and that profession is in demand in the U.S. He and his family settled in Boulder, Colo.

Plaatjes would have had a good chance to win one of the three spots on any Olympic marathon team. Though he ran his best time, 2:08:58, seven years ago, he won last year's Los Angeles Marathon in 2:10:29. Ken Martin's qualifying time of 2:12:06 is the fastest in the field for Columbus .

Plaatjes believes he's in the best shape of his life and expects to prove that in the London Marathon on April 12. If he runs a fast time there, he hopes the IOC will let him compete under the Olympic flag in Barcelona , much as former Soviet athletes did in Albertville . Plaatjes says, "I still have a glimmer of hope."
—MERRELL NODEN

Pocketful of Miracles

An electronic encyclopedia takes the heft out of baseball stats

Since it was first published in 1969, Macmillan's The Baseball Encyclopedia has become, as its dust jacket proudly proclaims, "the cornerstone of every baseball fan's library." Some kind of stone, anyway: The 2,781-page encyclopedia weighs about 10 pounds. Students of the game came to accept that the tome's heft was a burden they had to bear for access to baseball's statistical history.

But now that burden has been lifted. Last month Franklin Electronic Publishers, Inc. introduced the Big League Baseball encyclopedia, the electronic equivalent of the Macmillan book. For $129, any baseball fan can have the power of instant information at his or her fingertips. The Franklin computer's data base contains 620,000 batting stats, 270,000 pitching stats and biographical information on every major leaguer in history. But the Franklin encyclopedia's most stunning feature is its size: Measuring 4� by 3� inches and just barely tipping the scales at five ounces, the palm-sized product takes up less space than Nolan Ryan 's entry in the Macmillan encyclopedia.

In seconds, the machine can answer practically any query. What player had the most hits for the Cincinnati Reds in the '80s? ( Ron Oester , 1,069.) What team won the most games in the past 10 years? ( Toronto , 890.) What player weighing more than 250 pounds had the most stolen bases in a career? ( Frank Howard , eight.)

The machine does have some drawbacks. For instance, the screen can display only three lines of information at a time. Also, the stats can't be updated after this season. (Next year Franklin is planning to introduce a model that can be updated annually.) But even with those limitations, the Big League Baseball encyclopedia elicits this appraisal from SI editor at large and veteran baseball writer Steve Wulf : "This is the greatest invention of all time. All right, maybe the invention of the light bulb was greater. But this is right up there."
—ALBERT KIM