What was going on when I was born?

The Yankees, maneuvering their pitchers like chess pieces, got caught in an unruly hitters' contest tonight and lost to the Tigers, 8-5. The Yankees started Dave LaRoche, a reliever, instead of Tommy John and called on Ron Guidry, a starter, to face the last Detroit batter. But no combination of pitchers could thwart the Tiger hitters, who suddenly found their midsummer swings after scoring only one run in the last two games here. Between LaRoche and Guidry, the Yankees used Dave Wehrmeister and George Frazier, both of whom were recently called up from the Triple A farm team in Columbus. Frazier was spiked in the ankle and taken to a hospital for stitches.

-------------------------------------------------------------------- LISA HAMMEL is a writer who divides her time between New York and Massachusetts' North Shore. By LISA HAMMEL Beauport, an elaborate turn-of-the-century ''summer cottage'' is probably not like any historic house you have ever seen. Its eclectically decorated 40-odd rooms and eccentric architecture are all a monument to the preoccupation, or perhaps obsession, of Henry Davis Sleeper. Born in 1878, the younger son of a Boston family, Sleeper studied architecture in France as a young man, but his family was comfortably enough off so that he never had to concern himself with earning a living. In 1907, he went on a visit to Gloucester, about 40 miles from Boston, to see his friend A. Piatt Andrew - later a Congressman from Massachusetts - who had a summer home on Eastern Point, a neck of land about a mile long at the eastern end of the city. Sleeper was apparently enchanted with this wooded and meadowed bastion of privilege on the North Shore of Massachusetts. He bought a small piece of land - less than an acre - overlooking the deep, U-shaped curve of Gloucester Harbor and the open water beyond. Shortly thereafter, he engaged a local architect, Halfdan Hanson, and began building his own summer cottage.

making group'' over a period of years means that there will be no dramatic change as a result of the shift. ''We're going to pursue as diligently as we can the main aspects of our program,'' said the hefty, quiet-spoken utility president. ''And the main aspect of our program, as far as I'm concerned, is to get us off foreign oil and on to domestic sources. I don't see anything the public could perceive as a change in policy.'' But in an interview at his Manhattan office, the 55-year-old resident of Rye touched on a wide variety of issues affecting the utility's 295,000 electricity consumers in Westchester, from safety at the Indian Point nuclear-power site to customer rates.

William French Smith tied on his black tie, stepped into a chauffered sedan and went to a party one night not long ago. The evening was marked by strolling musicians, silver candelabra, trees strung with Christmas lights and a dinner for 250 under a green-and-white-striped tent on the Mall. In addition to the Attorney General, there were lots of other Cabinet members, White House officials and important Republicans, which is not surprising. In Ronald Reagan's Washington, many Republicans go to parties six nights a week. They also ride about town in chauffeured limousines. They live in the most expensive sections of town and have vacation homes in California and Maine.

ANGEL OF LIGHT By Joyce Carol Oates. 434 pp. New York: E.P. Dutton. $15.50. By THOMAS R. EDWARDS WITH 12 novels and 11 books of stories published within the past two decades, Joyce Carol Oates must be our most productive writer of serious fiction. Like such other big producers as Doris Lessing, John Updike and Norman Mailer, she recalls an old-fashioned idea of the novelist as one who does not occasionally unveil a carefully chiseled ''work of art'' but who conducts a continuous and risky exercise of the imagination through the act of writing. Where a new novel by John Barth, Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller or Thomas Pynchon is deemed, whatever its merit, a literary event, a new novel by Joyce Carol Oates is, we may feel, another new novel by Oates, better or worse than the last one, certainly different from it, but hard to see as a major demand upon our attention. This immediate response is unfair but perhaps not lasting. With occasional exceptions (Joyce, Flaubert), we finally care most about novelists like Dickens, George Eliot, Balzac, Tolstoy, Hardy, James, Conrad, Lawrence or Faulkner whose work is copious enough to constitute a ''world,'' and though no guarantees can be offered, energy like Joyce Carol Oates's may find an eventual reward.

-------------------------------------------------------------------- STEPHEN SOLOMON is a contributing editor of Science Digest. By STEPHEN SOLOMON As we walked out of the forest into the afternoon sun, only an expanse of small yellow flowers mediated the boundary where the giant sequoia trees confronted the sheer granite cliffs of the Sierra Nevada. The trees behind us, their trunks fluted like the columns of an Athenian temple, towered more than 200 feet. Across the valley of the Kaweah River lay the sawtooth ridges of the Great Western Divide, its snow fields shimmering in the sunlight. We had come to Sequoia National Park in California to see the massive trees and the mountains that had been created by geological forces eons before mankind made its first footprint there. But for my friend Debbi and me, the most pleasant surprise was the delicate flowers that celebrate their brief life in the Sierra summer with a blaze of color. Seeing them blooming in the shadow of trees whose lifetime spans three millenia, I thought of a poet's admonition that one could not pluck a flower without troubling a star.

The Biltmore Hotel, for 68 years a celebrated hub of the Grand Central neighborhood, surprised guests, employees and city landmark officials by closing its doors Friday night and bringing in scores of workers to begin demolishing its interior. Permanent residents were given 30 days to leave, and guests were informed in a brief letter that most basic services - including all dining facilities - had been eliminated. The management offered its help in relocating customers. It had been known since last month that the owners intended to strip the hotel to its steel skeleton and reconstruct it as a granite-clad building, to be the main New York City office of the Bank of America.

Reagan Administration dreams no little dreams. Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger would like to spend about $200 billion over five years on strategic nuclear forces alone. His plan, to be presented to President Reagan in California tomorrow and no doubt to be debated in Congress and the nation for months to come, proposes to move toward revising fundamental assumptions, notably giving up acceptance of East-West nuclear ''parity.'' Instead, the United States would strive for nuclear ''margins of safety'' that imply outright nuclear superiority. The plan, as reported by The New York Times and confirmed in large part by a White House spokesman, would blur the edges of the classic nuclear defense ''triad'' of bombers, missilefiring submarines and land-based missiles in silos. Existing Minuteman and Titan missiles would stay in silos, but the new MX missile might not. While Mr. Weinberger was reported to be backing away from making an immediate recommendation on the controversial basing of the MX, the option favored in his comprehensive proposal is that the missiles be flown in dozens of new, light fuel-efficient planes. Until the planes were ready late in the decade, the so-called vulnerability window - which nuclear theorists say will open in the mid-1980's - would be slammed by MX's based in C5 Galaxy transports or Minuteman silos. They might be protected with anti-ballistic missiles permitted under a 1974 accord.

Upsets are so common at Saratoga Race Track that when Willow Hour won the Jim Dandy Stakes at odds of 18-1 two weeks ago, apparently nobody took the race seriously. But Willow Hour proved that performance was no fluke today. Sent off at 24-1, he held off Pleasant Colony, the Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner, and the 2-year-old champion Lord Avie on a rain-soaked track to win the 112th running of the Travers. ''This is easily the biggest win of my life,'' said his trainer, Jimmy Picou, as he basked in the winner's share of $135,600 of the $226,000 purse after the race.

AIR travel in or out of Connecticut last week involved day-to-day uncertainities and varying frustration as some flights were delayed or canceled, but according to Government and private air transportation officials, the state's eight airports suffered few disruptions as a result of the nationwide air traffic controllers' walkout. ''It's certainly better with the controllers, but we can get along without them by going to a different set of rules,'' said George Roohr, manager of the Groton-New London Airport in Groton, whose control towers, along with those at Danbury Municipal Airport, were shut by the Federal Aviation Administration Aug. 6, three days after the controllers' strike started. Nonstriking air controllers and supervisors at the two municipally run, general-aviation airports were shifted to other airports, among them Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, the state's largest airport. Bradley, which normally has a complement of 49 air traffic controllers, was reported last week to be operating with 22.

Since the split-season divisional playoff format has drawn criticism, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn said yesterday that he and the presidents of the American League and National League will meet this week to decide whether another postseason plan would be feasible. Manager Tony LaRussa of the Chicago White Sox has already said that his team would deliberately forfeit late-season games if it meant making the first round of the playoff system, which was revamped in light of the seven-week-long strike by the players. ''It's theoretically possible for a team to lose in order to get into the playoffs,'' Kuhn said during an interview with NBC Sports. ''We'll address the problem and have something to say in a few days. We have been in touch with the people concerned about this and we're going to deal with the problem.''

FROM modest beginnings a decade ago, legalized gambling has grown into a major industry in this state with revenues of almost twothirds of a billion dollars a year. But continued growth of gaming and of the income it provides the state - $91 million last year - is in doubt. Although one of the state's three lotteries continues to register gains, the jai alai frontons in Bridgeport, Milford and Hartford have faltered as has the greyhound race track in Plainfield. The Wolcott horse track, provisionally licensed in 1974, is the only major new gambling facility permitted to be built in the state through 1983 under a moratorium enacted by the General Assembly, but on Thursday that license is expected to be challenged by gambling regulators. And given the opposition that has already been expressed to casino gambling - Governor O'Neill told reporters at a briefing last month that he was ''absolutely'' opposed to the idea -new gaming facilities would seem to be limited to a modest expansion of the chain of 16 offtrack betting parlors and the operation on Sundays of existing facilities, such as the Teletrack Racing Theater in New Haven.