Cheap Seats

No votes for Marge’s Ashtray?

If some disenchanted taxpayers get their way, Cincinnati’s proposed baseball stadium will be called “Field of Schemes” and a new football venue will be dubbed “Wherewegonna Park.”

Those were among more than 1,000 suggestions submitted after The Cincinnati Enquirer asked readers to name the new stadiums. Many of the 418 respondents are angry about a plan to raze Riverfront Stadium and build two new stadiums with a penny-per-dollar sales-tax increase.

A dozen people suggested “Dumb” and “Dumber” for the new fields. Others favored “County $tadium,” “Cha-Ching Stadium” and “Taxus Maximus.”

Based on the Bengals’ losing records the last few years, one reader suggested, “The Opossum Den.”

“They play dead at home and get killed on the road,” he wrote.

Accidentally on purpose

Lee Smith knew he hadn’t hit a batter in a while, and he knew his last was a Minnesota Twin. Beyond that, his memory was a little fuzzy.

“Some kid named Larson, I think,” Smith said.

Actually, it was Larkin, Gene Larkin, on July 20, 1988. That was 464 innings, about 7,000 pitches and four teams ago for the Angels closer. Smith’s streak, the longest going in the majors, ended recently when he plunked Texas’ Ivan Rodriguez.

“It wasn’t that bad a pitch,” Smith said. “He kind of leaned into it. He really got himself hit.

“I know I haven’t had too many in my career. But I’ve hit Tommy Herr a few times. I know that because I was throwing at him.”

Just what we need: more baseball stats

Having already established that smokeless tobacco causes oral-health problems, researchers have taken a swing at the follow-up: Does it help performance?

No, according to a study of 158 major-league baseball players from the 1988 season in the Journal of the American Dental Association which found:

The mean batting average for non-users was .248, compared with .238 for users.

Average fielding percentage for non-users was .978, compared with .968 for users.

Pitchers who used smokeless tobacco had ERAs of 4.11, while non-users averaged 4.20.

The study also indicated dipping played no role in making a team. Of 290 players initially examined during spring training, about 64 percent of non-users and 62 percent of users made the big club.

So spitting doesn’t help. Will someone give us a grant to study scratching?

Old and in the way

It isn’t so much that Jack Nicklaus is losing distance off the tee, or that his putting stroke is no longer steady. Where Nicklaus notices the difference in his golf game is away from the course.

“Now when I return from a tournament,” he explains, “my friends say, ‘Nice playing, Jack,’ if I finish fifth or sixth. It used to be that if I finished sixth in a big event, they would say, ‘Too bad, Jack.’ I’d like to hear that again.”

The last word …

“We did it! Last year we finished 11th in the Big Ten. I thought that was impossible. But it shows that if you stay focused in life, anything is possible.”

- University of Minnesota football coach Jim Wacker

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo