These are very confusing times for sports fans. After an 82-game schedule and a never-ending play-off schedule, the basketball season is, at last, winding down. Fan interest is peaking and the teams are trying to get to the championships.

Basketball, in my opinion, is a way to keep busy and athletic during the long, cold and snowy winters. It does not belong in June and July.

Warm gymnasiums and hoops keep kids out of trouble. That was the idea behind James Naismiths' placing peach baskets at two ends of the YMCA gymnasium in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Give the youngsters a game to compete in and expend some of that youthful energy during the winter.

The National Basketball Association (NBA) does not follow that rule. The season starts in November and in the middle of June they are still shooting three-point shots.

When kids should be outside playing basketball, they are indoors watching the end of an overlong season.

A new endeavor pokes its athletic head onto the scene. It is called baseball. It is the "American Pastime." Basketball is frantic and hurried while baseball season is an unhurried 162 games, give or take an asterisk.

The Grapefruit League or Spring Training has made the sports pages, but draws little or no interest. The games do not count and make no impression on the sporting crowd.

Pitchers are loosening their arms and batters are sharpening their eyes for the coming season. The teams move north and in April, even though it is freezing, the opening games begin. The President of the United States throws out the first ball and we are off.

There was an old joke in Vaudeville about the farmer who was carrying six-dozen eggs and his pants begin to fall down. He asked the question "Should I drop the eggs and pick up my pants, or let my pants fall down and carry the eggs?"

That is the confusing problem between baseball and basketball. "Should I watch the end of the basketball season or should I start paying attention to the balls and strikes of baseball?"

It is puzzling.

In October and World Series Time, the whole confusion starts once more.