Cheap Seats

Don’t hold your breath

The odds are long that Pedro Martinez will win 30 games for the Boston Red Sox. According to Stats Inc., only one pitcher in the second half of the century has done what Martinez needs to do win 15 games in 16 starts in the same season: Steve Stone, from June 12 to Aug. 23, 1980.

Slammin’ this performance

Jayson Stark of the Philadelphia Inquirer points out that Pete Rose got 4,256 hits and never hit two grand slams in his career.

Jim Palmer pitched 3,948 innings and never gave up any grand slams.

So, asks Stark, how unbelievable was it that on April 23, Dodgers pitcher Chan Ho “Out of the” Park gave up two slams to the same hitter - Cardinals third baseman Fernando Tatis - in the same inning? Now that’s a record as unbreakable as records get.

“Three in an inning? I don’t think that will happen,” Cardinals thirdbase coach Rene Lachemann said. “And I know it can’t be done off the same pitcher - unless the manager is trying to get fired.”

Put them on the red-eye

Stark adds that you know it’s been a goofy baseball season when the Colorado Rockies could score 12 runs May 19 - and still lose by 12.

In the Rockies’ incomprehensible 24-12 loss to Cincinnati, Reds leadoff man Mike Cameron batted eight times in nine innings, .132-hitting Reds outfielder Jeffrey Hammonds thumped three homers, it took 402 pitches to play nine innings, and the Reds couldn’t get to the airport in time to catch their charter. When the airline called to complain, manager Jack McKeon asked: “What were we supposed to do - leave after the fifth inning?”

Not very reserved

Jared Jones, a reserve quarterback at Florida State, knocked on the apartment door at 4 a.m., was let inside, asked the female residents to get the futon bed for him to sleep on, and started to raid the refrigerator.

He ate pizza, he ate sandwiches, he ate tortillas, he was even boiling water to cook hot dogs when the three women came to a conclusion. None of them knew Jones. They asked him to leave, he refused, they called the cops. The police arrived to find Jones outside - with a package of hot dogs in hand.

The students declined to press charges, so the police took Jones home, this time to the right one.

“I wasn’t really mad at him,” Kerri Crispell, one of the women, told the Tallahassee Democrat. “If I see him again, I’d joke with him and ask for my hot dogs back.”

Don’t make ‘em like they used to

They unveiled a bronze statue of St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Famer Enos Slaughter recently outside Busch Stadium, showing him in typical hustle pose, a slide with spikes flying. Like the good old days.

“You know, I never heard of a hamstring and a rotator cuff in the 1930s and 1940s,” said Slaughter, now 83. “We just went on out and played. You see so many players today round first and `Oops, out two weeks, hamstring.”’

The last word …

“Purdue goes on probation, Northwestern turns into the Las Vegas of the Midwest, Ohio State gives away grades, Michigan football players cut an unauthorized swath through Kmart, Minnesota jocks hand in papers they never wrote, and Barry Alvarez’s kid microwaves a frat brother’s canary. Yep, it’s official. Bobby Knight is the only sane one left in the Big Ten.”

- Jim Armstrong of the Denver Post