Of Walks, Super Stars and Rattling the Cage

Wandering and wondering . . .

Wasn’t “Ball Four” a book?

It was. It was Jim Bouton’s original “kiss-and-tell” baseball book, which featured outrageous revelations about ballplayers getting up on hotel roofs with binoculars. Presumably, they were not stargazing.

The Padres, however, have their own version of Ball Four. If it were a book, it would be entitled something like “How to Lose Baseball Games Without the Other Guys Really Trying.”

Or maybe “Walk on the Wild Side.”

I have heard of walking the dog, but walking Tracy Jones is something else.

How often in baseball history has a team lost two games in one series on bases-loaded walks in the last inning? Who knows? “Bases-loaded walks to lose games” are not in the baseball record books. Had it happened in the harsh glare of a World Series, it would have gone down with Bonehead Merkle and Mickey Owen and Johnny Pesky.

But the Padres quietly, at least in a national scope, lost games in the Cincinnati series on bases-loaded walks to Tracy Jones in the Reds’ last at-bat, the first a generous gift from Lance McCullers, the second a four-pitch special from Mark Davis.

The Padres were those two pitches, and one other, from a phenomenal trip. The one other resulted in a bases-loaded double by San Francisco’s Will Clark last week. A respectable 7-8 trip was that close to 10-5.

How much better does that sound?

But at least the guy who hit the double had to do something.

Let me give you the roll call.

Milton Wegeforth, Gerry Driscoll, Malin Burnham, Lowell North, Dennis Conner and Vince Brun.

You guess that these are America’s Cup luminaries and their crews?

Wrong. At least, that is not what they all have in common. These are world champions in Star Class racing, and all just happen to be from San Diego. They have won 10 such championships among them, topped by North’s 4 and Conner’s 2.

This comes to mind because the Star Class Olympic trials, along with the Soling Olympic trials, will be conducted for two weeks off Point Loma, beginning Tuesday.

I would say this appears to be like triple-A baseball, the best going on to the biggest, except that triple-A baseball teams cannot to go on to win world championships.

But look at this year’s names, and you can get a feel for who might become heralded figures in The Main Event . . . America’s Cup racing.

You take San Diegans such as Vince Brun, 40, the world champion in 1986, and toss in Paul Cayard, 29, first in the 1984 Olympic trials, and Mark Reynolds, 32, second in the 1988 Star world championships, and I’ll give you . . .

a.) A San Diegan who will be the U.S. helmsman in the 1988 Olympics.

And . . .

b.) Dennis Conner’s replacement when Conner gets tired of hassling those pesky Kiwis and hoping for a zinc oxide commercial.

After two days of machinations in bankruptcy court, it is appearing more and more likely that the Sockers will survive their financial travails and come back to shoot for their seventh indoor championship in eight years.

And, given the list of 11 contracts Ron Fowler intends to purchase, it appears that the team will be returning with more than mere skeletal remains of the 1987-1988 champions.

And so I give you another roll call . . . the intended survivors:

Hormoz Tabrizi, Branko Segota, Paul Dougherty, George Fernandez, Ralf Wilhelms, Zoltan Toth, Zoran Karic, Keder, Brian Quinn, Paul Wright and Rene Ortiz.

Some of those included might be considered surprising, such as Wilhelms, Wright and Ortiz. These fellows are there because they are young, and the future must be considered, and they are also cheap, and the salary cap must be considered.

But what of the omission of goalkeeper Jim Gorsek, who took a tremendous cut to help get under the salary cap this last year with the understanding that it would be made up to him?

And what of the omission of defender Fernando Clavijo, who is only a member of the 10-year All-Major Indoor Soccer League team?

I suppose it is a sign that this nice little sport has finally become as businesslike . . . and heartless . . . as its older brothers. It probably had to.

Juli Veee? He’s a special case. The Sockers can set him off to the side, just as the Lakers did not protect Kareem Abdul-Franchise in the National Basketball Association’s expansion draft. He will be available to them when the dust has settled, provided something can be worked out.

As we near the end of a decade filled with scandals in intercollegiate athletics, one individual has frequently come to my mind as being representative of all that is good and healthy.

He went to San Diego State, where he played basketball.

His name was Michael Cage.

He was impressive physically, but more so when you sat with him and talked. He was articulate, intelligent and . . . interested. He could talk about the game, but also his classes and the world around him. He had pride without ego.

Michael Cage deserved nothing but the best.

And then he got the worst.

He had hoped to play in the NBA, but instead he was drafted by the Donald Sterling Clippers.

Cage labored for the Clippers for four years and won the NBA rebounding title this year for a team that won only 29 games.

And then he was traded this week.

“I was shocked,” he said. “The logic behind this is that there is no logic.”

There never has been. Not with the Clippers.

Michael Cage wondered out loud what he had done to deserve such treatment. It must have been an initial touch of shock that warped his normally orderly thought process. The real question was . . . What had he done to deserve to be stuck with such a woebegone franchise in the first place?