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Baseball stuffs hacker

Next week’s baseball All-Star Game nearly fell prey to late-millennium technology.

Chris Nandor heard in late June that Boston shortstop Nomar Garciaparra was 20,000 votes behind the Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees in All-Star voting. So Nandor took advantage of Major League Baseball’s newest way of voting - via the Internet.

Nandor, 25, of Carver, Mass., went to work on a program that cast some 40,000 votes for Garciappara.

Monday, the American League announced its All-Star lineup, as voted on by fans. And sure enough, there was Garciaparra at shortstop, 20,446 ahead of Jeter.

As it turned out, Garciaparra won it fair and square.

Fans were allowed to vote 22 times on the Internet, the average number of home games for each team during the balloting. Nandor’s attempt to vote 40,000 times was detected before it could be added to the tally, according to Alex Kam, director of Major League Baseball’s Web site.

“We know all about him,” said Kam, reeling off Nandor’s name, address, age, place of employment, and computer number. “On May 19, he voted 14,702 times for Garciaparra. We caught all of them and filtered them out.

Nandor said he didn’t do it just for kicks.

“I think in large part I did it just because the All-Star game was going to be in Fenway, so I felt Nomar deserved a start on his home turf, with the incredible season he’s had.”

What happened to the good ol’ candy bars?

Doug Flutie’s Flutie Flakes proved to be such a hot item in upstate New York last year that a bit of a cereal craze is in the making in the NFL.

Arizona Cardinals quarterback Jake Plummer is introducing Jake’s Flakes in the Arizona market, and New York Jets receiver Wayne Chrebet has Chrebet Crunch going into New York stores.

“You look back to where I started, and the next thing you know, I have a cereal with my name on the box,” Chrebet said. Where will it end? Who knows?

Among other athletes’ comestibles have been Pittsburgh Penguin Jaromir Jagr’s creamy peanut butter, Nolan Ryan steak sauce, and a cereal and four types of mustard named after Ed McCaffrey of the Denver Broncos.

Offer bugged him

University of Utah basketball coach Rick Majerus, when asked about reports that he was being sought by the University of Minnesota for the Gophers’ coaching opening, thought about his ample girth, and said, “Too many bugs. If I take my shirt off up there, the mosquitoes are going to say, `Buffet!”’

The last word …

“The only thing I noticed was that it was real quiet in the dugout. That’s when I noticed Bobby wasn’t there.”

- New York Mets pitcher Masato Yoshii on working a game during manager Bobby Valentine’s two-game suspension.