Some Call It Trick or Treat, but Others May Call It a Career

It’s bad enough to get hurt on the field of battle, but when it happens elsewhere, as it has to a number of baseball players, it also can be humiliating. Here are some examples from a list compiled by Bob Sudyk of the Hartford Courant:

Ron Kittle (New York Yankees): “Injured his neck helping to carry teammate Lenn Sakata off the field on a stretcher.”

Alan Trammell (Detroit Tigers): “Playing the Frankenstein monster one Halloween, he fell from his stilts and injured his knee.”

Oddibe McDowell (Texas Rangers): “Suffered an eight-stitch cut in his middle finger while buttering a roll at the team’s welcome home luncheon.”

Mickey Tettleton (Oakland Athletics): “Went on the disabled list with a foot infection caused by tying his shoelaces too tight.”

Joe Azcue (Boston Red Sox): “Ate four pounds of grapes given to him by fans before a game in Anaheim, and doctors had to be summoned to pump out his stomach as he began to ferment in a pool of perspiration on the trainer’s table.”

Doc Swigler (New York Giants): “Pitched one game for the Giants in 1917, injured his arm throwing snowballs and retired.”

Off the Hook: Sports agent Don Franken of Beverly Hills got a call from Borden Foods asking if he could produce an athlete to participate in a three-day fishing outing on Lake Erie as part of a promotion.

Franken put in a call to Ted Williams at his office in Maine. He was told that Williams was out.

“When will he be back?” Franken asked.

“In three weeks,” he was told. “He’s gone fishing.”

Said former San Francisco and St. Louis slugger Jack Clark when Tony Kornheiser of the Washington Post asked him how long he expects to play for the Yankees: “I’m going where they pay me. If they pay me next year, I’ll play here again. I’ll go as far East as I have to. If they pay me in Japan, I’ll go there.”

Kornheiser: “Clark has been known to spend money. When he decided to take up fishing a few years ago, the first thing he bought wasn’t a rod, a reel or a stupid hat, it was a $40,000 bass boat.”

Trivia Time: What do managers Dick Williams, John McNamara and Don Zimmer have in common? (Answer below.)

How tough is Louisiana State center Jose Vargas? Says Oklahoma’s Stacey King: “Man, that guy came up with the nastiest dunk I ever saw.

“We were playing in Oklahoma City, he took the ball and started the dunk in Louisiana. He brought it through Georgia and then BOOM, it landed in Oklahoma. The goal just rattled. That got my respect.”

For What It’s Worth: As National Basketball Assn. coaches, Red Auerbach (Washington, Tri-Cities, Boston) and Bill Russell (Boston, Seattle, Sacramento) have won titles only with teams on which Russell played.

Would-you-believe-it dept.: Willis Reed won more games in his first five days as the New Jersey coach than Dave Wohl did in the first month. Wohl was replaced by interim coach Bob MacKinnon after going 2-13. Reed, after replacing MacKinnon, went 3-0, beating the Clippers, Boston Celtics and New York Knicks.

Trivia Answer: All three have managed both the Boston Red Sox and the San Diego Padres.

Quotebook

Lawrence Jordan, 5-foot 6-inch sophomore guard who has broken all the school records for assists at Indiana Fort Wayne High School: “My father is 5-4 and my mother is 5-3, so actually I’m the giant in the family. They call me Kareem.”