The Slice: Tough calls: Who goes to disabled list?

I honestly don’t know how women of a certain age ever learned to prioritize and make tough choices.

That’s because I don’t recall any of them collecting baseball cards as girls. So they never went through the agonizing process of determining which ones to sacrifice to their bicycle spokes.

Maybe they learned something from selecting Barbie outfits. Who knows?

But boys who faced the decision about which cards to stick in the spokes — to create a vaguely motorized sound — acquired valuable training.

Oh, sure, at first it was easy. You could use duplicates. If you had half a dozen Dick Groat cards and four John Boozers, you had your bike fodder right there.

Then, after those wore out, you could turn to checklist cards. Or maybe you could use managers, team pictures or “NL Home Run Leaders” and “Senators Rookies.”

Eventually though, the picking got tougher. If you were to continue clothespinning baseball cards to your bike, you had to start disowning players.

Now if your favorite team was in the National League, you might ax certain American Leaguers. See ya, Felix Mantilla of the Boston Red Sox. Adios, Ed Charles of the Kansas City Athletics.

After that, assuming your allowance was already depleted and reinforcement cards were not forthcoming, things got sticky.

Did you really want to give up your Bill Monbouquette card? Could you feel OK about chewing up Don Wert or renouncing Bob Aspromonte?

Each boy would have to look within himself and answer some character-building questions: Will I be sorry if I ruin my Luis Tiant card? Do I get enough of a kick out of the cards-in-the-spokes buzz to grease up Jerry Lumpe and shred Joe Amalfitano?

This searing evaluation turned boys into, well, boys with fewer trading-condition baseball cards. But one has to assume this was good training for life.

Of course, no one had any notion back then that these cards would become collectibles.

Some lessons are learned too late.

Today’s Slice question: How could you tell Spokane zombies from regular zombies?