These Guys Take Some Cold Cuts at Situation

The sorry state of what to do with Ted Williams’ body and his DNA, his son having him frozen for posterity, has been a boon to late-night humorists.

From NBC’s Jay Leno: “It was so hot, people were claiming they were related to Ted Williams just so they could get their head frozen.” And, “The daughter wants to bury him. The son wants to freeze him. And now Anna Nicole Smith wants to marry him.”

From CBS’ David Letterman: “Today, Mike Piazza held a press conference to announce he’s not frozen.”

Among Letterman’s top 10 good things about being cryogenically frozen:

* Never again have to answer the question, ‘Hot enough for ya?’

* If your name is Jim, friends and family will refer to you as ‘Jimsicle.’

* When they thaw you out in a few thousand years, you’ll have lots of stuff to watch on TiVo.

* When you come back to life, you get to keep your frequent-flier miles.

Trivia time: With what team did Williams sign after graduating from San Diego Hoover High?

Proud papa: Dallas Maverick Coach Don Nelson, at a press conference announcing the promotion of his son Donnie to president of basketball operations, asked, “Are you my boss now?”

Ambitious wannabe: Jerry Kelly, who won the Western Open last week, is no shrinking violet.

When told that his win moved him from No. 10 to No. 3 on the PGA money list, Kelly said, “What it means is that I’ve got only two more spots to climb. I’m trying to climb two more spots.”

That means past Phil Mickelson and Tiger Woods.

“I’m No. 3 now and that’s not No. 1. I am still striving to get to be No. 1. You think I’m satisfied with being No. 3? No way. I’m working harder to climb even higher,” he told Dan Manoyan of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Tough love: Terry Foster in the Detroit News: “So, the goal for the Charleston RiverDogs was to be the first baseball team to have no one attend one of its games. With the way the Tigers are playing, aren’t they headed in that direction too?”

Logic 1A: In 1961, when Casey Stengel was building the New York Mets as an expansion team, he selected catcher Hobie Landrith in the expansion draft.

Asked why he’d chosen a catcher, Stengel said, “If you don’t have a catcher, you have a lot of passed balls.”

School daze: How much would it be worth to follow NASCAR’s Winston Cup circuit to research a paper on “Southern Culture and Stock Car Racing?”

An anthropology student at UC Santa Cruz has received $20,000 in grants for the task.

Trivia answer: The San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League.

And finally: Chipper Jones, on what makes his Atlanta Brave teammate, pitcher Tom Glavine, so effective, even though he doesn’t throw an overpowering fastball:

“He makes a living feeding off other people’s aggressiveness. It’s why Tommy Glavine is who he is and where he is in this game. You may stand in the batter’s box and salivate, saying, ‘I can hit this guy.’ Then, three hours later, after you’ve been in a bunch of what you would say are hitter’s counts, he’s hung an 0 and 4 on you. He’s made an art out of it.”