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It's summertime, the start of school is still another few weeks away, and in the midafternoon the Cincinnati Reds' clubhouse is filling up with kids, lucky kids whose fathers are big league ballplayers. There are tall ones and chubby ones, white ones and black ones, decked out in team-issued, red-pinstriped uniform pants and batting-practice jerseys, headed outside to take BP or play catch on a big league diamond under a big league sun. And at some point they all have to pass by the double-wide corner locker where Ken Griffey Jr. sits on a giant trunk and trash-talks them.

''You'd better come give me a high-five,'' Griffey yells to 6-year-old Ryan Weathers, son of pitcher David Weathers. And when the boy refuses and begins to run away giggling, Griffey pounces.

''I'm going to be your agent, right?'' Griffey screams. He has the boy down on the floor, squirming, unleashing a barrage of noogies, pokes and tickles. Ryan is shaking his head, giggling uncontrollably. ''C'mon, I'll do it for three percent,'' Griffey says. No deal. ''Two and a half!'' Finally, the boy relents and Griffey sets him free.

Griffey climbs back on the trunk, laughing -- ''The Kid'' at play, the slugger at peace. Now in his 18th major-league season, with three or four careers' worth of accomplishments and heartbreaks behind him, Griffey, 36, is an elder statesman of the game, a father of three and -- it appears -- the patriarch of what might be called the Reds' extended clubhouse family.

And at one time, before a slew of injuries wrecked the story line, Griffey was considered the leading contender to break Hank Aaron's hallowed record of 755 home runs. That's not likely to happen now -- at least not by him -- yet Griffey still carries himself, here in the autumn of his career, as someone with no regrets.

The Reds, 11 years removed from their last playoff appearance and six years since their last winning season, are back in contention this summer.

Griffey's numerous injuries made him the focal point of fan disenchantment in recent years, leaving him, by all accounts, sullen and withdrawn. But now he is a major part of the Reds' renaissance, contributing 23 homers and 63 RBI thus far, second on the team in each category to left fielder Adam Dunn. His rate of one homer every 14.6 at-bats ranks ninth in the league. Though the Reds are a flawed team, there is, for once, hope in Cincinnati that Griffey could play in his first World Series this fall.

Still, these days Griffey seems less interested in the Reds' fortunes, at least as a topic of conversation, than in the latest exploits of the three kids -- Trey, 12; Taryn, 10; and Tevin, 4 -- he shares with his wife, Melissa.

It is difficult to observe the sense of peace that Griffey exudes and not compare it to the very different feeling that trails the fellow superstar whose career is linked so inextricably to his own. In the 1990s, Griffey and Barry Bonds were the undisputed players of the decade for their leagues -- Bonds in the NL, Griffey in the AL, where he spent the first 11 seasons of his career with Seattle.

Despite the temptations of the era in which he played, Griffey -- who has had a long, close friendship with Bonds -- said he never even encountered the proverbial crossroads where the choice to go down the steroid road was presented to him.

''I was never around it,'' he says. ``My friends didn't do drugs -- I've had the same friends since high school. With a lot of guys, (their introduction to steroids) was through a personal trainer at a gym somewhere -- it had nothing to do with baseball. You go to any gym, and there's somebody who knows something about that stuff.

There are no regrets here about the past, no self-pity over what might have been. And there also is very little serious thought about his baseball future. Griffey's eight-year, $116.5 million contract with the Reds runs through 2008, with a team option for 2009.

What there is, then, is only the present, and what a present it is, with the Reds in the playoff race, a beautiful family to go home to and marvel at, and this warm feeling of peace that has The Kid feeling like The Kid again.

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