Cheap Seats

Heck, that was just a pop fly

When Colorado’s Brian Bohanon got the win in a crazy 16-11 victory over Seattle a while back, he gave up eight earned runs and four homers that traveled 1,732 feet.

Ken Griffey hit a 478-footer off a third-deck facade. “Mark McGwire hit one 511 feet off me last year,” Bohanon said. “So Griffey’s was a measly shot.”

Don’t throw him any heat

Kevin Costner, the star of such baseball film classics as “Field of Dreams” and “Bull Durham,” was in Omaha for a College World Series game this spring between Cal State Fullerton and Stanford.

Costner, a Fullerton alum, never tried out for college baseball, believing he was too small to play, and was discouraged because he was not recruited out of high school.

The experience pushed him even harder to become an actor, he said.

“They’ve all come to accept me in a way I couldn’t have anticipated,” he said of his association with Cal State’s baseball teams. “I’m sure that maybe they take it a little easy on me because I have lawyers.”

Get a move on

MSNBC’s Scott Ostler on the Cleveland Cavaliers firing Mike Fratello, master of the deliberate offense:

“The owner said he wants the team to go in a new direction. Actually, he wants them to go in the same direction, but twice as fast.”

No bonus games awarded

A month after the Rockies became the first team since 1964 to score in all nine innings of a game, the Pirates scored in the first eight two weeks ago in Detroit but were shut out in the ninth by the Tigers’ C.J. Nitkowski.

“I was sitting there looking at the scoreboard,” Nitkowski said, “and it looked like something out of PlayStation.”

The last word …

“Personally, I have faith in Phil Jackson. I have no doubt he could make Shaquille O’Neal every bit as good as Luc Longley.”

- Gary Shelton in the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times