August 16, 1981

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.