Cheap Seats

Worthy of a marquee

The next time Mark McGwire visits Shea Stadium, will the planes heading for LaGuardia change their flight patterns?

One wonders, because last month he hit a homer at Shea Stadium that ranks with his all-timers.

It blew out a light panel 60 feet up on the scoreboard. The Mets estimated it at 502 feet. And that’s scary enough.

But what makes this a McBomb is that the scoreboard is in right-center field. Which means, in the careful judgment of long-distance home-run historian Bill Jenkinson, this blast appears to be the first legitimate 500-foot opposite-field home run by anyone since an estimated 505-foot smash by Babe Ruth at Shibe Park in 1921.

“It looked like a missile,” Mets right fielder Benny Agbayani told Jayson Stark of the Philadelphia Inquirer. “It just kept going up, up, up in the sky.”

In many stadiums, blasts like this are marked forever. But how would the Mets mark this one?

“Maybe they should put a light bulb up there with his initials on it,” Agbayani suggested.

Wise-cracker

In a rare moment of offensive innovation, Mets pitcher Pat Mahomes recently did something rarely seen before.

He hit a broken-bat thunker in front of home plate. Then the bat head wobbled through the air and did something practically impossible: It hit the ball again. And how often do you hear the crack of the bat twice in the same at-bat?

“Hey,” Mahomes said, “it’s not often I hear the crack of the bat any time.”

Oh, yeah, he was out.

Take a walk, Jeff

Jeff Bagwell of the Astros recently became the third player ever to walk six times in one game, joining Jimmie Foxx and Andre Thornton.

But unlike hitters who hit historic homers and drop the bat to watch them, Bagwell couldn’t figure out how to commemorate his big six-walk night.

“He should have moonwalked down to first,” Houston Astros broadcaster Jim Deshaies suggested.

But the best review of Bagwell’s performance came from losing manager John Boles of the Florida Marlins, who said: “I would have been happy to see that game go longer - so we could have walked him some more.”

What a dish!

Yogi Berra was one of the few former teammates Joe DiMaggio would invite to join him and Marilyn Monroe at lunch while the New York Yankees’ Hall of Fame outfielder was married to the actress.

“You had lunch with Marilyn Monroe?” asked an obviously impressed Dave Kaplan, director of the Yogi Berra Museum in Montclair, N.J. “What do you remember from that lunch?”

“The shrimp cocktail,” Berra said. “That restaurant served the biggest shrimp I ever saw.”

The last word …

“I’ve always prided myself on not striking out four times in a game. And I still haven’t.”

- Philadelphia Phillies third baseman Scott Rolen after striking out five times against the San Diego Padres.