PHILADELPHIA - The Philadelphia Phillies played the Texas Rangers Tuesday night for the first time in team history, and there certainly must be someone who thought this was a good idea or something other than merely a flat, bland stretch in the long road of a baseball season.

For every interleague game that gets you an up close look at Johnny Damon or Ichiro Suzuki, there are a half-dozen more that bring only Hank Blalock and Laynce Nix.

Not that there's anything wrong with Blalock and Nix, who both play for the Rangers, in case you missed it, but there is simply no reason to give a good hoo-hah about them here.

With very few exceptions, interleague play, once a somewhat interesting novelty, has worn out its welcome. Perhaps it is time baseball went back to the sanctity of the two leagues and the wild notion that less might actually be more.

The biggest indictment of interleague play, which began with the 1997 season, is that Major League Baseball has never figured out a way to implement it fairly. Such a small matter has failed to interest the game's front office, however.

After the 1994 lockout and the cancellation of the World Series that year, baseball's brain trust was willing to try any and all gimmicks to lure back the fans it had driven away with sticks.

Rather than trust in the product they had - and find a way to impose some fiscal sanity on it - Bud Selig and the backroom boys went for the cheap thrill. They even had the audacity to invent annual "rivalries" they hoped would somehow take root, ignoring the fact that the game likes to nurture something so fragile over decades.

Maybe interleague play was a harmless idea in comparison with some other post-1994 fallout. Less damage has probably been done by it than by the pinball-ization of the game with juiced baseballs and juiced players.

So, sure, compared with that, interleague play has been no worse than most ideas to save the game. It's great, in fact, compared with the ongoing atrocity of the designated hitter.

But it's time to move on.

It's time to admit that the Seattle Mariners and San Diego Padres are never going to become natural rivals. It's time to stop living on the sugar high baseball gets from Yankees-Mets and Cubs-White Sox.

It's time to think instead about what's fair and, in the long run, what might be more interesting.

This will not happen, of course. It won't happen mainly because the crowds for interleague games in the first eight seasons of the experiment were about 14 percent higher than regular games.

Because interleague games have been on weekends more often than not, some of that statistical edge is suspect. And because of the huge bounce from the marquee events - the Mets set a three-day Shea Stadium attendance record of 167,493 versus the Yankees last month - the rich teams benefit more than the lesser ones.

Still, baseball very seldom turns its back on money and shouldn't be expected to in this case.

But the game's front office does have to answer for a situation in which - on "rivalry" weekends this year - the Phillies will have played the Baltimore Orioles and Boston Red Sox, while the Florida Marlins will have played two series against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

Even though the Phillies beat the Orioles two out of three, this hardly seems equitable. (It does make more sense than Washington keeping its natural rivalry with the Toronto Blue Jays.)

Baseball does not mind looking ridiculous, however. Everyone always complains about the schedule, is the front office response. Playing Baltimore and Boston rather than Tampa Bay is just one of those things.

The basic agreement between baseball and the players' union, which includes the interleague agreement, comes up for renewal next year. There will be 10 years of interleague play in the books by then and little real reason to keep going.

Occasionally interesting but consistently unfair is not much of a recommendation.