No one wants to put money on this fight. Reagan leads Brown by three or four percent, with nearly 20 percent of the voters undecided.

As Governor Edmund G. ("Pat") Brown's advance men hurriedly tried to round up a crowd for their man's imminent appearance, the elderly pensioners in the Long Beach, Calif. park watched impassively from their benches.

Dressed in the gaily-colored sports shirts that California males wear, regardless of age, the old men napped and talked with friends. But one 70-year-old, who had refused to halt his croquet match even to meet the Governor, spotted a reporter and seemed determined to put himself on record.

"I know what you want to ask!" he told the reporter. "You want to know if the Dodgers or the Giants are going to win the pennant.'

The pennant race, of course, was the overriding concern of most Californians this summer. Neither Brown, seeking his third term, nor Ronald Reagan, the political upstart from "Death Valley Days' who chaired Barry Goldwater's California campaign, is half as entertaining.

In a campaign where "image' counts heavily, both men have shown themselves to be soporific. Brown has never been much of a campaigner; he has an undistinguished platform manner, an unremarkable face, and a voice that shrills when he is put on the spot.

Reagan speeches, despite the man's pre-Labor Day build-up as an actor and the exaggerated Time Magazine reports about his fantastic charisma, are surprisingly dour and mechanical.

What Reagan has going for him that Brown does not is a new surface unity in his party and a fervent neo-conservatism among the voters that helped the Republicans elect George Murphy to the Senate in 1964.

The Reagan campaign machinery would never have made the mistakes Brown made that day in Long Beach. Every moment of Reagan's time is planned a week in advance; he goes only where he is assured large crowds and he depends on large doses of television to get his message across to the voters.

Brown, on the other hand, has tried "Hubert Humphrey campaigning." He likes to make 20 five-minute speeches a day, stopping off at amusement parks, beaches, and shopping centers to shake hands. He hopes that his advance men will be able to summon crowds for these impromptu appearances.

But what usually happens to Brown is that people pass him by without a backward glance. Then, he is likely to burst into a foot-stomping temper, as he did recently at the Los Angeles County Fair, in a much-publicized incident.

Unlike 1958 and 1962, when he came from behind to beat established political figures, Brown has not established a spunky, fired-up campaign organization. No matter what the polls show, he can no longer claim to be the underdog, as he did so winningly against Senate Republican Leader William F. Knowland and Richard Nixon.

This year, Reagan has subtly projected himself as the underdog; he ingenuously calls himself a "citizen politician," which somhow implies that Brown is merely a used-up, corner-cutting political hack.

The Democratic party has charged substantially since the last gubernatorial campaign, too. This year, Brown has suffered considerably from hostile elements in his own party, although in both 1958 and 1962 he had a fervent organization behind him.

In those campaigns, the Democrats, savoring the possibility of victory after being out of office for almost 20 years, were willing to forget old rivalries and personal jealousies just to get their own in office.