Junk Food Might Do Wonders

It wasn’t long ago that Whitey Herzog was blaming all the St. Louis injuries on weightlifting. Now he’s blaming diet.

“Why are we getting all these side pulls?” he said. “It’s got to be diet. They’re all vegetarians. They’re all on salt-free diets. They’re all so finely tuned. They snap too frequently. There’s got to be a reason for it.

“I think they ought to go out and eat a steak with some fat. Get some juice on that muscle.

“Paul Waner never had a pulled muscle. Babe Ruth never had a pulled muscle. Their diets weren’t too good. Babe lived on hot dogs and beer. Once in a while, that might be good for you.”

Add Ruth: Ty Cobb once said of him: “How that man loved to eat. If he’d ever been sawed in half, I think three-fourths of the Yankee Stadium concessions would have been found inside of him.”

Trivia Time: Why does New York Mets pitcher Sid Fernandez wear No. 50? (Answer below.)

Well Done: From USA Today: “The roast for NBC’s Marty Glickman in New York last week ran so long that Glickman’s family had to leave to catch a plane--while he was still speaking.”

The lament of Nancy Lieberman, now playing for the Washington Generals, patsies to the Harlem Globetrotters: “I can remember when I was at Old Dominion, calling home and saying, ‘Mom, we won the national championship.’ Now I call home and say, ‘Mom, we lost our 6,347th game in a row, but I’m building up a lot of frequent-flier mileage.’ ”

From Richard Justice of the Washington Post, predicting Atlanta’s Chuck Tanner will be the next manager to be fired: “Although they were hitting .182 through Thursday, the Braves hadn’t taken a single extra round of batting practice, mainly because only two of Tanner’s six coaches are physically able to throw. He brought four of his cronies with him from Pittsburgh, and not one of them is able to throw BP.”

Trivia Answer: He’s from Hawaii, the 50th state.

Quotebook

Mike Scott of the Houston Astros, after the attendance of 1938 was flashed on the scoreboard at Atlanta last week: “I didn’t know if it was the attendance or the year Nolan Ryan was born.”