She Didn’t Nag Him, After All

A few weeks ago, a plane flew over the Oakland Coliseum with a sign attached. “Groove,” it said. “You forgot to do the dishes--Becky.”

The next day, the plane delivered another message: “Groove, be home at 5, don’t be late--Becky.”

Groove is Don Baylor of the Athletics. Becky is his wife, Rebecca.

Baylor, however, grew suspicious after seeing the planes. “That’s not my wife,” he said. “My wife’s upstairs waiting for me. She wouldn’t do something like that.”

Says Ken Rosenthal of the Baltimore Sun: “It turned out that first base coach Rene Lachemann financed the practical joke as a way of getting even with Baylor, who had the name of Lachemann’s wife printed on the back of his warmup jacket.”

From George Kiseda of Los Angeles: “Suggested title for the inevitable book if the Lakers win Game 7 on June 21: ‘The Boys of Summer.’ ”

Kiss-of-death Dept.: The Sporting News usually comes in the mail on a Thursday or Friday. This time, it didn’t come until the following Tuesday. On the cover is a picture of Oakland A’s third baseman Carney Lansford, with the caption, “A .400 Hitter?” By Tuesday, he was down to .378.

Also on the cover is Cleveland Indians pitcher Greg Swindell, who since has dropped two straight starts.

Others pictured: Curtis Strange and Michael Spinks.

Trivia Time: Which NBA team was the last to win consecutive titles without Bill Russell at center? (Answer below.)

Stu Inman, director of personnel for the Miami Heat, on why he’s not promising any miracles in stocking the National Basketball Assn. expansion team: “I’m one imperfect human being judging other imperfect human beings.”

How does a manager get thrown out of a game? Simple. Don Zimmer of the Chicago Cubs says his conversation with umpire Joe West Wednesday went like this:

“ ‘That ball was high.’ ‘It wasn’t high.’ ‘That ball was high.’ ‘It wasn’t high.’ ‘That ball was high.’ ‘You’re gone.’ ”

Would-you-believe-it Dept.: Fernando Valenzuela, a one-time National League strikeout champion who shares with Carl Hubbell the record of five straight strikeouts in an All-Star game, has only 36 strikeouts this season, fourth best on the staff. That would give him 100 for the season, compared to a career-high 242 in 1986.

Atlanta announcer Ernie Johnson, a former pitcher, called Valenzuela’s fastball nothing but a memory Tuesday night.

“This isn’t the same Fernando Valenzuela,” he said.

Duke Snider, in his new book, “The Duke of Flatbush,” tells of the irony of winding up his career with the San Francisco Giants.

“At that stage in my career, I wasn’t a major league player,” he said. “I was 37 years old and wasn’t very comfortable playing, but I needed the money.

“When I was with the Dodgers, we really despised the Giants’ orange and black. It got to the point where we hated Halloween.”

Cincinnati Reds coach Tommy Helms, while filling in for Pete Rose during the manager’s 30-day suspension, didn’t get much accomplished record-wise but he at least managed to lose some weight.

Helms: “The interviews after the games ran so long I kept missing the postgame meal.”

Trivia Answer: The Lakers. In 1954, they won their third title in a row--as the Minneapolis Lakers.

Quotebook

Mac O’Grady, on how to prepare for a U.S. Open: “I make sure I don’t play for a couple of weeks before the tournament so that the lymphatic system in the brain that stores all the emotional memory circuits have a couple of weeks of rest and there’s been no neural transmitters of adrenaline released into the central nervous system.”