What was going on when I was born?

When he was in the eighth grade, he used to sneak into the San Diego Stadium or sometimes sell soft drinks in the upper deck. He still lives about two miles from the Padres' ball park. In the winter, he goes to the stadium every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and works out with some of the Padres. He even gets treated by their trainer. Yet, nobody has done more to shoot down San Diego's hopes in the World Series than Alan Trammell, the native son, the good neighbor, the boon companion of all those Padres, also the star shortstop for the Detroit Tigers and their most destructive hitter in the Series.

Mozart's ''Clemenza di Tito'' - an opera being slowly extricated from beneath two centuries of myth and misunderstanding - makes its Metropolitan Opera debut this Thursday in a new production by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. Mr. Ponnelle is by rights the only man for the job; for it is he, in a series of productions over the past 15 years, who has done the extricating almost singlehandedly. The conductor will be the Met's music director, James Levine, and the cast features Renata Scotto as Vitellia, Kenneth Riegel as Titus and Tatiana Troyanos who, as a mezzo- soprano, sings the male role of Sesto. ''Tito'' has lain buried for several reasons; among them are the stories surrounding its composition - some of which aren't true. We now are fairly certain, for example, that Mozart did not write it in 18 days as traditional history reports, but in 50. Nor was he at the time already racked with terminal illness.

LONDON ON a grey London morning, John J. Phelan Jr., who sits atop the citadel of free world capitalism, the New York Stock Exchange, eased into a boxy black taxi and went calling. He met with officials at the Bank of England on famed Threadneedle Street and at the London Stock Exchange nearby. He held talks at the Salomon Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs offices here. And he broke bread with international financiers at the venerable City of London Club. Mr. Phelan was a man on the prowl - posing questions, listening and sniffing out the latest trends in world finance. His mission: To expand the domain of the New York Stock Exchange to London and beyond. But the fact that the chairman of the Big Board, who hates to fly, traveled 3,000 miles to explore business here says something about the state of the 192-year institution. The day when the Big Board had an iron grip on the trading of America's stocks has long passed. It now operates in a world of pressing competition. International financial activity is expanding and markets the world over are trading new products at a dizzying pace. In his five months as chairman, Mr. Phelan has become increasingly convinced that the exchange must run fast if it is to remain the world's preeminent financial marketplace.

Bishop James W. Malone, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, yesterday issued a statement asserting that the bishops had no intention of creating a ''voting bloc'' and denying that the church was involved in single-issue politics. The statement also said that politicians might concur with the bishops on Text of statement, page 30. moral issues while disagreeing over how to address those matters in terms of public policy. In recent weeks, the bishops have been accused by some critics of meddling in partisan politics in an effort to elect candidates who supported the church's stand against abortion. Examination of Issues Urged ''We do not seek the formation of a voting bloc, nor do we pre-empt the right and duty of individuals to decide conscientiously whom they will support for public office,'' Bishop Malone said.

FORT DIX DRING President Jimmy Carter's Administration, talk of virtually closing Fort Dix as an economy measure buzzed through this Army post in central New Jersey. Now the talk has quieted - some say, for good. ''Our unofficial slogan of late has been 'Dix Is Back,' '' said Dick Dowling, a spokesman for the fort. ''I don't judge or explain Government policies. The fact is that we have commitments, and that's enough for us.''

At first glance, it looks as if a village of traditionally styled homes is going up near the stone entrance of the old Sandanona estate on Franklin Avenue in Millbrook, N.Y. But the six peaked-roofed, frame residences under construction there actually will hold 18 condominiums. Mary G. Volino, a principal in Village Condominiums, the developers, said that to make the units different from the standard town- house design, they were styled after the Dutchess County farmhouse.

ABUSES in the football program at the University of Florida extended past the star and the average player to the extent that they involved even a walk-on reserve place-kicker, according to the kicker, a former Florida player. The player, Declan O'Donohue, said that members of the Florida football staff paid the rent and utilities for his off-campus mobile home in 1979 and gave him an additional $700 in cash when he expressed the desire to leave the school in September and fly home to Ireland. O'Donohue is now the soccer coach at Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C. He described these and what he said were other violations of National Collegiate Athletic Association rules by Florida football coaches in a recent interview with The New York Times after the N.C.A.A. charged Florida with a record 107 violations of association regulations. None of O'Donohue's experiences at Florida are among the 107 violations cited by the N.C.A.A. At a time when Walter Byers, the executive director of the N.C.A.A., says that rules violations in college athletics are almost out of control and that some star athletes are receiving more than $20,000 a year in illegal payments, O'Donohue's case, as he describes it, suggests that impropriety can reach even the lowest, and seemingly inconsequential, levels of a program.

AFTER YEARS of high hopes and dire warnings, the myths surrounding how many American jobs high technology will create or eliminate are beginning to fall away. The news is neither as good as hoped for nor as bad as first feared. Jobs that most people traditionally associate with high technology - in computers, software, defense, electronics and biotechnology - account for only a tiny fraction of the nation's total employment. And while growing fast, ''the fact is that the high-tech pie is not that big, and probably never will be,'' said John U. Burgan, who follows trends in technology for the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Between now and 1995, even the most optimistic projections show that only 1 new job in 25 will be ''technology- oriented'' - involving engineering, the sciences or the computer industry. If high technology has not saved the American economy, however, neither has it destroyed it. Fears that automation, particularly computers and robots, would threaten the jobs of millions of workers in more traditional ''smokestack'' industries now seem somewhat overstated. or at least premature. Automation has come to the machine-tool industry, the coal industry, the home-appliance, steel and auto industries. But it has come slowly. And while the results are hard to measure - no one seems quite sure how to quantify the effects of new technologies, and many companies go to great lengths to obfuscate - the evidence that millions have been replaced by machinery seems scarce.

Jack Morris and Alan Trammell, products of Detroit's lush crop of 1976 amateur draft choices, today moved the Tigers one victory away from raising the World Series championship flag at Tiger Stadium. Morris, who also won the first game, pitched a five- hitter, and Trammell slugged two home runs and drove in all of the Detroit runs as the Tigers downed the Padres, 4-2, and took a three-games-to-one lead in the four-of- seven Series. The victory, in which the Tigers scored first for the seventh time in their seven postseason games, put them in position to win baseball's championship Sunday when the teams play the fifth game. Dan Petry, the losing pitcher in Detroit's only loss, will work against Mark Thurmond, who lost to Morris in the Series opener last Tuesday in San Diego.

Folks don't understand the blues,'' August Wilson writes in his drama ''Ma Rainey's Black Bottom,'' which opened Oct. 11 at the Cort. ''They hear it come out but they don't understand how it got there. They don't understand that's life's way of talking. You don't sing to feel better. You sing because that's a way of understanding life.'' With ''Ma Rainey's Black Bottom,'' Mr. Wilson has written his own blues. He based his play on a real blues singer, Gertrude (Ma) Rainey, and he set it in her actual recording session in Chicago in December 1927. The language of Mr. Wilson's characters, alternately sassy and sorrowful, is the language of the blues, which has always been a music for crying and dancing. Ma Rainey and her band members tell stories that blues songs have told, of sexual liaisons and Satanic possession and everyday toil. The only difference is that Mr. Wilson made his music out of sentences and syllables rather than calloused fingers trembling against guitar strings.

A Salvadoran rebel leader met here today with an intermediary to discuss details for a meeting in El Salvador next week between the rebels and President Jose Napoleon Duarte. The arrival here of the intermediary, the Auxiliary Bishop of San Salvador, Gregorio Rosa Chavez, appeared to satisfy rebel demands that final preparations for the meeting scheduled for Monday, especially security arrangements, be discussed beforehand in private, direct talks. However, after more than five hours of talks, the rebel leader said several issues still needed to be worked out before the meeting. 'We Have Made Advances' Guillermo Ungo, a leader of the Democratic Revolutionary Front, added that the rebels intended to meet as scheduled on Monday. But he declined to say if the pending details might still delay the meeting. When asked if the talks with Bishop Chavez went well, Mr. Ungo said, ''In the circumstances the Government has presented to us, which are irresponsible, things are going well. We have made advances.''

THEY came to mingle, to socialize and to eat lunch. But above all they came to do business. ''Our company packages food items for corporations to give as gifts - we have gift packages in all price ranges and will arrange shipping also,'' said Joanne Klein, who, with her partner Joan Dichter, runs Gifted Desserts. She was speaking with Mort Warsaw, who immediately expressed interest in her product and said: ''My company manufactures packaging materials. We have all the cartons, paper and packing materials you need. I think we should work together.'' The owners of Gifted Desserts were exhibiting at the Advancement for Commerce and Industry, called A.C.I. by the 500 or so members who attend each monthly luncheon meeting. Mr. Warsaw of the M.N.G. Packing Company had stopped by their exhibit table, one of more than 100 at a recent session. A.C.I. members enthusiastically touted not only their own businesses, but also the benefits of belonging to the Island-wide business-to-business networking group.