Cheap Seats

Is that a baseball bat or a ruler?

It’s like she’s batting cleanup in a religious order or been named the major leagues’ first designated prayer.

For now you can collect or even trade Sister Mary Assumpta’s baseball card.

The card company Upper Deck has printed 10,000 cards featuring Sister Assumpta in her Indians jacket, holding a bat in her left hand and a chocolate chip cookie in the other.

The mother superior for the Sisters of the Holy Spirit in Cleveland has baked cookies for Indians players since 1986 and is one of the team’s biggest fans.

Upper Deck is donating $2,000 to Sister Assumpta’s community and $1,000 worth of memorabilia to the nursing home for which she’s chief fund-raiser.

She said she has received nothing but positive feedback from the Roman Catholic community about the card, especially from her fellow nuns.

“They’ve really gotten a charge out of this because they’re all baseball fans,” she said.

Still, we have to insist that Cleveland doesn’t have a prayer of winning the World Series.

Eddie, Eddie, Eddie

Larry Bird, Oscar Robertson and Wes Unseld are among the seven basketball greats who will be inducted as the inaugural class of the Missouri Valley Conference Hall of Fame.

Bird played for Indiana State, Robertson for Cincinnati and Unseld for Louisville.

Also in the first class, which will be inducted Aug. 26, are Hersey Hawkins of Bradley, the late coach Hank Iba of Oklahoma State, Saint Louis University’s Ed Macauley, and Wichita State’s Dave Stallworth.

No word on how many votes Eddie Bird, Larry’s younger brother, received.

They call him The Streak

Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Kordell Stewart got his start as a runner, trying to keep cool in his native Louisiana.

“When it was hot, we kept the door from the kitchen to the garage open a crack,” his father, Robert, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “We’d let him run around the house in the nude. He’d see that daylight, run to it, get out in the garage and run down the street, buck naked.”

Charitable donation

Anyone who has been to a professional golf tournament, or watched one on television, knows about contests in which cars are given away as prizes for a hole-in-one.

Peter Koch, of Warwick, R.I., learned a lesson firsthand about such contests during the pro-am of the Senior PGA Tour BankBoston Classic.

Koch won a 1997 Cadillac DeVille when he scored a hole-in-one on the 176-yard 17th hole.

“We went crazy,” Koch said. “We’re all jumping around and celebrating. I thought I won the car.”

Well, he sort of won a Cadillac.

Someone told him there was a small sign which said that if an ace was made, the car went to the tournament charities, not the player.

Instead, Koch won a $500 gift certificate for Cadillac merchandise.

At least he didn’t win a lifetime supply of car fresheners.

The last word …

“Unfortunately, they’re all dead. I’m goin’ out to the graveyard and have a beer with ‘em. I’ll pour it on their graves.”

- Pittsburgh Steelers center Jimbo Sweeney, when asked in Dublin whether he had any relatives in Ireland.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo