August 4, 1986

The Organizaton of Petroleum Exporting Countries is bogged down in what some analysts believe is one of the most serious crises in the group's 26-year history. At the end of a week's deliberations, the organization's members adjourned for the day again today without reaching an agreement. Negotiations will continue Monday. In part, the reasons for the crisis are political. Two of OPEC's 13 members, Iran and Iraq, are locked in a six-year-old war of attrition that has split the group's Arab members down the middle. On the one hand, moderate Sunni Moslem states along the Gulf led by Saudi Arabia side with Iraq, while the radical governments of north Africa, such as Libya and Algeria, throw their lot in with the revolutionary Shiite regime in Teheran.

IT was late morning in Cleveland, and nearly all the Yankees were on the field going through baseball's rituals: shagging flies, aiming for the fences, strolling in the outfield, getting into a baseball state of mind. Rickey Henderson was involved in his own ritual. He was the last to change out of his clothes, the last to finish his doughnut and coffee, the last of the regulars to jump into the batting cage. He moved about his teammates and his friends from the Indians. His face was bright and he chatted away. But while everyone else seemed busy and scurrying, Henderson seemed separate. In the way that the sandlot player comes in from across town, and with few words dominates, Henderson seemed, wittingly or unwittingly, arrogant. His hitting, his base stealing, his home runs and his mastery of center field in Yankee Stadium have established him as one of the game's best all-round performers and easily the best leadoff hitter in baseball. He is on the track to become the leading base-stealer in baseball history. Last year he batted .314, hit 24 homers, scored 146 runs, drove in 72 runs, and stole 80 bases. Already this season he has 19 homers and has stolen 66 bases.

The Economy How much Japanese investors will buy is the question that is dominating trading as the credit markets prepare for the $28 billion in notes and bonds that the Treasury will auction this week. The Japanese bought $9 billion worth at the May auction, and market conditions remain similar. [ Page D1. ]

An obituary of the classics scholar Sir Moses I. Finley on July 11 misstated his age. He was 74 years old.

When it was over, Dave Johnson considered that the Montreal Expos had come to town with a winning record over the Mets and were leaving now in a state of collapse, and said: ''We have long memories. We don't like anybody to have a winning record against us - anytime. It's the nature of all those guys out there.'' When it was over, Buck Rodgers, the manager of the Expos, was asked what it was like to lose three games and two regular players in one series, and he replied, ''A horror.''

The United States Senate's vote two weeks ago to extend the sale of subsidized wheat exports to the Soviet Union and China, vigorously opposed by Secretary of State George P. Shultz and the Australian Government, has also led to dismay on the table-flat Canadian prairie. The vote was followed by President Reagan's decision on Friday to authorize the sale of 3.85 million metric tons of subsidized wheat to the Soviet Union. ''If you're going to drop prices that way, we're going to follow,'' said Lorne Parker, who, with his son, farms 2,100 acres in Manitoba's Red River Valley. ''And we will do so until we go broke.'' The Senate action on July 22 -which has been supported by the House Agriculture Committee - has drawn stiff protests from Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, as well as Australian Prime Minister Robert Hawke, who object strenuously to subsidized sales to Moscow and Peking. Although both countries' share of the world wheat trade has risen this decade at the expense of the Americans, they decry the havoc the raging wheat war between the United States and Europe is wreaking on their own farmers.

The Hammermill Paper Company said yesterday that its directors had unanimously rejected an unsolicited, $52-a-share cash offer from a group led by Paul A. Bilzerian, a Los Angeles investor. Hammermill said its board reached its decision Saturday after consulting with its financial advisers, Morgan Stanley & Company and the First Boston Corporation. ''Basically, they had their two investment advisers look the thing over carefully to evaluate it, and they came back to the company with the conclusion that the proposal was inadequate and not in the best interests of shareholders,'' said a spokesman for Hammermill.

Early this year, when crude oil prices plunged from $27 to $12 a barrel and sent shock waves through the oil industry, George M. Keller, the plain-spoken chairman of the Chevron Corporation, helped lead the industry's bullish countercharge. Prices would not remain at depressed levels, he said repeatedly. They would rebound enough to average $20 a barrel for the year. Now, however, Mr. Keller, acknowledges that the industry bulls have lost their campaign, largely because of the continuing failure of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to curb its crude oil output. The loss, he and other industry executives believe, will further tear the tattered fabric of the United States oil patch - forcing additional and sharper cuts in company exploration budgets for the year, dramatically shrinking domestic oil production and in years to come increasing the volume of crude oil imported from OPEC countries to worrisome levels.

On the trading floor of Dillon, Read & Company is a pot sprouting a vigorous green plant, labeled with a brass plaque: ''The Perfect Hedge.'' It is an amusing reminder that, despite an array of sophisticated market techniques, there is no hedge, or foolproof protection, against a steep decline in the value of a security. That painful lesson was driven home anew in the past few months, when the market for mortgage-backed securities was sharply affected by an unusual shift in interest rates that caught even the savviest of professionals off guard. Top firms such as Salomon Brothers, the First Boston Corporation and Goldman, Sachs & Company, among others, are believed to have lost hundreds of millions of dollars when the hedges they had relied upon to protect their huge holdings of mortgage-backed securities plunged them deeper into the red rather than keeping them afloat. A 'Worst-Case Scenario' For many investment bankers and traders who had earned fortunes from this booming business, it was a sobering episode. The lingering memory may change the way many large securities firms operate.

Halfway into what was expected to be a banner season for domestic tourism, there appear to be more Americans traveling in the United States this summer than last, but their numbers are falling short of predictions. A spot check by correspondents for The New York Times around the nation found some longtime tourist attractions enjoying moderate to substantial increases in attendance and others recording disappointing crowds. Figures made public Friday by the Travel Industry Association of America, a trade group, generally corroborated these findings. The association said travel in the United States was 5 percent higher in the first half of 1986 than in the first half of 1985. It also reported that air travel to overseas destinations was down 10 percent in June from June 1985, and down 3.3 percent for the entire first half of this year.

Already beset by heavy debts and low prices, many Middle Western farmers are now facing a grain storage squeeze of historic proportions. From giant terminals along the region's major waterways to smaller rural warehouses and even to makeshift bins and converted tool and equipment sheds on many farms, nearly every available space in many corn-growing states, experts say, will soon be overflowing with the bounty of two successive bumper harvests. It is a situation that presents many farmers with difficult options, economists, farmers and grain dealers say. Those who have grown more than they can house can either dump grain onto a glutted market, accepting heavy losses from distress prices, or put their surplus production either in makeshift shelters or in unprotected heaps on the ground, risking spoilage. 'Worst Storage Situation' ''It is going to be the worst storage situation we have ever seen in the history of this country,'' said Merrill Marxman, a consultant who until recently was a commodities administrator at the Federal Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service.

Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato called yesterday for the resignation of the city's top immigration official after a Saturday night breakout by six immigrants from a Federal detention center in lower Manhattan. More than 25 prisoners have escaped since June 1985 from the center at 201 Varick Street near Houston Street. The police said the six immigrants slid down bedsheets after climbing out of a fourth-floor bathroom window. The escapees, an Ecuadorean charged with attempted murder and five Cubans, were still at large, the police said yesterday.