There’s No Time to Putter Around

Bill Lyon in the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Once, the two sweetest swingers in sports were discussing the relative merits of their professions: Theodore Samuel Williams, the last man to bat .400, and Samuel Jackson Snead, golfer.

“Williams, it is said, held forth for quite a time with profane eloquence about the difficulty of hitting a ball that is thrown with speed and guile. But in golf, he sneered, the ball isn’t moving at all.

“And Snead drawled this terse rebuttal: ‘Yeah, but you don’t have to find your foul balls and play ‘em.’”

Trivia time: Who holds the NBA playoff record for three-point field goals in a half?

Just a triple, please: One person who didn’t want to see Shawn Green hit a record-tying home run in Milwaukee Thursday was Dawn Becker of North Hills. She was rooting for a triple, which would have given her $1 million.

Becker was the contestant of the day in KXTA’s Kragen Auto Parts $1-million Hit for the Cycle promotion, in which a listener can win $1 million if the player she or he picks hits for the cycle.

When Green came up in the ninth inning, he already had three home runs, a double and a single.

Slide factor: Scott Ostler of the San Francisco Chronicle writes that the NBA can salvage the playoffs if it purges itself of some of the following sins:

* “The flop. Some players spray their shorts with Teflon, for longer and more dramatic fanny-glides across the hardwood. Most refs can’t tell when a player is flopping. Most refs think Jim Carrey’s forte is subtle nuance.”

* “The walk. Do the world’s greatest athletes really need those four bonus steps?”

Blah, blah: Hubert Mizell in the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times: “It seems Deion Sanders, as neon as he might have been as an athlete, is a one-trick bore as a TV commentator, capable of little but yapping about himself.”

More Mizell: “Why did it take NFL bosses so long to recognize it is as ludicrous for Los Angeles not to have a football franchise as it would be to list the world’s greatest cities without Paris?”

Dark Ages revisited: Art Spander in the Oakland Tribune: “We’ve stepped off the high road and down into the gutter. We’ve returned to witch hunts, the literal ones of Salem in the 1600s, the figurative ones of Washington in the 1950s. We’re making accusations and jumping at conclusions. We’re acting like fools.

“You’ve seen the stories by now, the hints a star player is gay; the insistence by Mike Piazza of the New York Mets that he is heterosexual, the firing or resignation of a reporter from the New York Post, Wallace Matthews, because he disagreed with the paper’s intent.

“Absurd.”

Looking back: On this day in 1941, the Senators lost to the New York Yankees, 6-5, in the first night game played in Washington’s Griffith Stadium.

Trivia answer: Vince Carter of Toronto, eight, against Philadelphia, May 11, 2001.

And finally: “The Colorado Rockies have been storing their baseballs in a humidor to keep them moist,” says Michael Ventre of MSNBC.com. “In a related development, Gaylord Perry has contacted the club about making a comeback.”