January 2, 2005

BY JIMMY GOLEN

ANAHEIM, Calif. -- Into the hotel lobby sweeps Andrea Mallis, with a purple velvet dress and a flowing mane of hair that is as out of place among the baseball executives and player agents as a World Series banner above Fenway Park.

She has come to baseball's annual bazaar offering her credentials as a sports astrologer, uniquely qualified to discern what's in the stars for the stars, the only one among those assembled more likely to ask ''What's your sign?'' than ''Where do I sign?''

New York Mets general manager Omar Minaya listens politely to Mallis' pitch without offering her a retainer. At $125 an hour (two-hour minimum), she is a bargain when weighed against the cost of one bad signing.

''Literally, I could save teams millions of dollars,'' she said. ''Baseball and astrology run in cycles. Timing is everything.''

Already they are off to a bad start.

''I would never schedule a winter meeting on a dark-moon Mercury retrograde,'' she said last month at baseball's winter meetings. ''Whoever does the scheduling obviously doesn't consult with an astrologer.''

In deals conceived during this particular Mercury retrograde, Arizona gave Russ Ortiz $33 million over four years, even though he faces, as Mallis could have told the Diamondbacks, ''difficult Saturn aspects.'' Jon Lieber got $21 million from the Phillies for three years despite a low-energy cycle looming over two of them.

And don't get her started about what Neptune has in store for new Red Sox pitcher Matt Clement.

Grabbing a seat in the media work room, Mallis lowers her books onto a table where reporters hunch over laptops cranking out news of the latest multimillion-dollar deal.

''I can smell the testosterone in here,'' she said.

And everyone else smells the patchouli oil in Mallis' wake.

Mallis offers her planetary prognostications on ESPN and the A's radio postgame show and for the game programs of half the teams in MLB.

Some of Mallis' insights are more of a hit than others.

She predicted that the Super Bowl halftime show ''should be rather ethereal, filled with the exotic, bizarre and glamorous'' and added -- a week before Janet Jackson's oft-viewed wardrobe malfunction -- that ''confusion can reign; lots of replays may be needed when strange alignments occur.'' She guessed that the outcome would be in doubt, and the New England Patriots won on a late field goal by Adam Vinatieri.

AP