What was going on when I was born?

WHITEY HERZOG, the field manager and former general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, is one of baseball's premier traders, and in recent years a new set of issues has cropped up in the course of his wheeling and dealing. ''Is he clean?'' is a question Herzog said he has been hearing more often these days. ''What's the way they say it now?'' Herzog said. ''Oh, yeah - 'Does he have a chemical imbalance?' '' The questions arise because more and more athletes are surfacing as drug and alcohol abusers, either because they admit their addiction and enter rehabilitation centers, or because they are implicated by people accused of dealing drugs or are themselves arrested. And the questions have urgency because the athletes' addiction affects sports in a variety of ways. It alters their on-field performance because of physical deterioration and emotional stress. It alters the way fans perceive their heroes and thus threatens the image of leagues and teams that promote themselves as wholesome entertainment. And it raises the specter that gamblers might alter the outcome of games with the cooperation of athletes who are desperate for money and vulnerable to extortion.

Every year Western high technology with military applications, worth millions of dollars, disappears beyond the borders of the Soviet Union and its allies. Sometimes the Warsaw Pact's procurement effort is so effective that the embargoed equipment is even returned to the West for secret repairs. American laws and North Atlantic Treaty Organization agreements ban the transfer of such sophisticated microelectronic and computer equipment. But the volume reaching the Eastern bloc is startling, according to Western intelligence experts. Much of it is obtained, they say, through dummy corporations and covert suppliers who cooperate with the technology procurement campaign, which is regarded as the current primary task of the K.G.B., the Soviet intelligence and internal-security agency, and the G.R.U., its military counterpart. The Case of the Man at Orly

An Executive Change item in Business Day on July 15 concerning the promotion of Dominic Mangone to vice president and controller of Montgomery Ward & Company incorrectly identified the company and the man he succeeded, Dale Feet.

''It's a terrible rule, but if it had happened to me I would have accepted it.

In the delivery rooms, doctors exhort mothers-to-be, ''Chut lek!'' In the kitchen, a chef swirls chicken pieces around a huge wok, while patients upstairs flourish chopsticks over rice and fried vegetables. A sign reads, ''X-Ray'' and ''X-Guang.'' Nurses carry around phrase-and-picture booklets with such helpful Chinese sentences as ''Please lie down.'' The efforts are part of a two-year-old project by the New York Infirmary-Beekman Downtown Hospital to make health care more sensitive to the special needs of the residents of Chinatown.

The biggest tenant in the World Trade Center, the State Workers' Compensation Board, is planning to move to downtown Brooklyn, rather than Queens as had been announced last year. The Cuomo administration has decided that the board, which rules on claims by workers injured on the job, will be the first state agency to leave the huge complex in lower Manhattan, where state offices are on 51 floors of 2 World Trade Center. The planned shift from Manhattan to Queens had aroused opposition among the agency's workers. It was not known how many workers would be involved if the agency moves to Brooklyn, a plan that has not yet been announced officially. The Queens site, in Jamaica, apparently was rejected because public transportation to the area was found to be inadequate.

The Reagan Administration is preparing a major expansion of covert intelligence operations in Central America as part of a plan to increase American military activities in the region, senior Administration officials said today. The plans, which the officials said are being refined but have been approved in general by the White House, include stepped-up support for anti-Government insurgents in Nicaragua and a campaign of sabotage directed against Cuban installations in Nicaragua. The expanded program of paramilitary action, the officials said, would make the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency in Central America the most extensive covert operations mounted by the United States since the Vietnam War. Intelligence officials said that under the plans, the rebel forces in Nicaragua that are supported largely by the C.I.A. would grow significantly beyond the current total of about 10,000 men.

The last few years have been tough ones for the Federal Reserve System, as the Fed's chairman, Paul A. Volcker, in effect acknowledged last week in his testimony on monetary policy. Interest rates were sky-high until mid-1982, developing countries of the third world are staggering under a mountain of debt they cannot pay and the United States economy is just beginning to recover from its worst recession since World War II. Many economists, primarily Keynesians, have been quick to put much of the blame for these problems on the central bank's three-year experiment with controlling the money supply through what they describe as ''monetarist'' policies. These critics of the Fed's experiment - which lasted from October 1979 to October 1982 - say it was an abject failure, and they add that future prosperity depends importantly on whether Mr. Volcker and his colleagues for practical purposes concentrate on keeping interest rates down. Monetarists, on the other hand, deny that the Fed has ever implemented the policies they advocate -an assertion that Mr. Volcker strongly supports - and they charge that rapid growth of the nation's money supply is already raising inflationary expectations, thus keeping real, inflation-adjusted interest rates high and endangering hopes for continuing recovery.

At a time when cultural organizations face growing financial uncertainty, three of the wealthiest private foundations in the United States are jointly establishing a multimillion-dollar fund to help qualified arts organizations achieve firmer fiscal management. The new National Arts Stabilization Fund has been organized by the Ford Foundation, which will provide an initial $7 million, and by the Andrew W. Mellon and Rockefeller Foundations, which will contribute $1.5 million and $500,000, respectively, at the outset. The three foundations, all in New York, intend the fund to provide grants to be used to achieve financial stability to selected dance, theater, symphonic and opera groups, and also to art museums and arts-training institutions across the country. While each of the three sponsors has been a substantial supporter of cultural organizations in past years, this is the first time they have joined to set up an independent institution that will seek to attract additional money from other sources and that will also provide consultants to help the arts groups to improve their budgeting and marketing practices. The new institution wants to secure $33 million by 1987, and to make about 100 grants during the first five years.

The Tandon Corporation was a small, specialized business back in 1979, making the delicate devices that record bits of information and retrieve them from computer files known as disk drives. Then the president of the Tandy Corporation, spotting a chance to cut his material costs, persuaded Sirjang Lal Tandon, founder of Tandon, to add a motor and chassis to the recording heads, and go into the disk drive business on his own. To get things going, Tandy ordered 50,000 of the units for about $12 million, and used them in its first Radio Shack personal computer. It was a step that Mr. Tandon, a burly, one-time mechanical engineer at the International Business Machines Corporation, has not regretted. Tandon - which is not a part of Tandy - is now the world's biggest independent producer of disk drives for small computers and word processors, and Mr. Tandon, known by his nickname, Jugi, is one of the nation's wealthier industrialists.

International U.S. covert intelligence operations in Central America will be substantially expanded to accompany increased American military activities in the region, senior Reagan Administration officials said. The plans, generally approved by the White House include stepped up support for anti-Government insurgents in Nicaragua and a campaign of sabotage against Cuban installations in Nicaragua. The expanded operations authorized for the Central Intelligence Agency will be the most extensive since the Vietnam War, Administration officials said. (Page A1, Column 6.) Three U.S. officials are being sued by an American landowner in Honduras, who charges that the Reagan Administration, in its haste to open a training base for Salvadoran soldiers, seized ranch land belonging to him and is refusing to vacate it despite his proof of ownership. He is seeking an injunction against the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State and the Chief of Engineers of the Army Corps of Engineers. (A8:3.)

The controversy over charges that the New York City police have brutalized blacks has thrust black leaders and would-be leaders into the spotlight, sometimes willingly, sometimes less so. The events of the last few weeks, culminating in last Monday's aborted Congressional hearing in Harlem, have highlighted the sources of power and the sometimes conflicting roles of a growing number of political and religious leaders. These include Representative Charles B. Rangel, the Harlem Democrat; the Rev. Calvin Butts of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, whose Black United Front in Brooklyn has long charged misconduct by the police. Some used the issue as a means of advancing the black community; others may have viewed it also as a way to achieve leadership and elective office. Historically, most blacks elected in New York were the product of the Democratic organization, which, anticipating the demands of minority groups, encouraged the careers of party loyalists. That often left party leaders in control of the number of such officials and of the officials themselves.