Cheap Seats

Good time for a vacation

Florida State football coach Bobby Bowden said he and wife Julia took a vacation to Italy this summer. “There is a priest over there who is a Florida State graduate, and he was going to arrange for us to meet the Pope,” said Bowden.

But alas, even the dean of football in the South had to take a back seat on this one. “He (the Pope) decided to take a vacation,” said Bowden. “I just wasn’t big enough for the Pope.”

Surely, Bobby knows the Pope is a Notre Dame fan.

Couldn’t take the heat

Regrets, he has a few but then again, not so few he can’t mention them over and over.

Like Mark McGwire, Reggie Jackson had 37 home runs for the Oakland A’s by the 1969 All-Star break. Reggie didn’t go on to break Roger Maris’ record and isn’t quite over it yet.

“I’m 52 now, and I’m enjoying life,” Jackson said, “but I have to tell you that I really regret the fact that the media attention bothered me so much in 1969 that I couldn’t get that record.”

That media must have done some job on Reggie. He only hit 10 home runs after the break.

Just a good old (rich) boy

J.D. Drew, the Philadelphia Phillies’ first-round draft pick in 1997 who refused to sign a contract, has joined the St. Louis Cardinals’ Double-A Arkansas Travelers, impressing teammates, who feared he’d be a coldhearted mercenary, and fans, who feared he’d be a high-priced bust.

“The way he came in made it easier,” first baseman Mike Hardge said. “He came in and wanted to get to know everybody… . We’re all doing the same thing. He’s just making a little more money.”

Drew, who played for $1,000 a month for the St. Paul Saints of the Northern League last summer when the Phillies refused to come up with an $11-million deal, took $7 million from the Cardinals. He says it was “a matter of principle for me. I believe God has a plan for my life.”

Notes Mike Leahy of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: “This is what, in the profession, we call a nice spin… .

“In truth, God sat out the Phillies-J.D. Drew negotiations. The tactics of Drew and his piranha agent Scott Boras were strictly hardball.”

Sounds like the Mafia

New York baseball writers have gone to war - with each other. Newsday’s Mets writer, Marty Noble, sent a letter to the Baseball Writers of America, alleging the local chapter chairman, Joel Sherman of the New York Post, told Mets general manager Steve Phillips he would rip the team “if Phillips didn’t ‘take care of”’ his newspaper.

The letter was obtained by the New York Daily News, which broke the story.

Sherman acknowledged complaining to Phillips about a Newsday story on Todd Hundley.

“I was trying to tell him that we have power that I don’t think you, and other people in your organization, recognize,” Sherman said. “… If Steve said I threatened him, what can I say? I clearly wanted him to understand our power. But it wasn’t like I was standing there with a sledgehammer.”

The last word …

“The only ‘pace’ I care about is Pace Picante.”

- Ken Griffey Jr. on his home-run pace.