Cheap Seats

Making quick work

Atlanta’s Greg Maddux retired the side in the first inning of Tuesday’s playoff victory over Houston on four pitches.

Houston Manager Larry Dierker said, “Our basic philosophy going in, and it is what (hitting coach) Tommy McCraw told the hitters, is, ‘If you see a good pitch to hit early in the count, swing.’

“I went over to him and said, ‘Boy, they really took your advice. Four pitches, three outs.”’

Sentimental journey

The love affair between Mike Ditka and Chicago Bears fans has never ended. On a recent edition of his radio show in New Orleans, most of the calls to Ditka, now the Saints coach, were from Chicago.

No one was criticizing his 1-4 start. He was getting sympathy messages.

A caller suggested: “Anybody who thinks you can turn it around overnight is a fool.”

Ditka replied: “I guess I’m a fool because I did have high expectations.”

Later Ditka recalled his Bears’ only loss in 1985 to the Miami Dolphins.

“Before the game, all our players were fraternizing. I knew it would be a bad night,” he said. “All this kissykissy, huggy-huggy before the game.”

Ditka and fans are mushy ones now.

Quite a nightcap

One of the luckiest baseball fans of the year was the guy who was thrown out of Dodger Stadium for excessive drinking and was in the parking lot when Mike Piazza recently became the first Dodgers player to hit a home run over the left-field pavilion. Willie Stargell did it twice.

“They took our IDs and our tickets,” Juan Ruvalcaba of Ontario, Calif., the fan who wound up with the ball, told the Orange County Register. “We were on our way to plant security to get them back. We were walking around the right side of the fence of the players’ lot. And then came the ball.”

A clubhouse attendant offered Ruvalcaba an autographed Piazza bat for the ball. Then, a collector offered $5,000. But Ruvalcaba said he’s holding onto the ball.

Other American pastimes

Shootings, stabbings, bloody corpses, burning bodies. Sound like a horror show? No, it was commercials televised during baseball’s World Series last year, according to a report in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

“In a single evening while watching the World Series, a child could have seen 14 overtly violent commercials,” says Dr. Charles Anderson, the author of the report.

Anderson videotaped all six World Series games, all of the American League championship series and four first-round playoff games.

Then he analyzed commercials using standards established by the National Television Violence Study, which call violence any overt depiction of physical force or threat of force intended to harm people.

“The commercials deemed violent in this study were not subtle,” Anderson said, adding that ads showed guns being held to victims’ heads, shootings, stabbings, forceful restraint, punching, bloody corpses and burning bodies.

Gee, Roberto Alomar doesn’t look so bad.

The last word …

“This week’s realignment plan: 30 teams, 30 divisions, all intrasquad games, zero travel costs.”

- Tim Keown, San Francisco Chronicle

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo