Digging Got You Down and Dirty

They tell the story about a batter digging in against Dizzy Dean, taking his sweet time as he scratched away with his spikes, until finally Dean yelled in, “You all done? You comfortable? Well, you better call for the groundskeeper and get a shovel because that’s where they’re gonna bury you.”

Ron Fairly, San Francisco Giants broadcaster, told the New York Times one about another St. Louis Cardinals fireballer, Bob Gibson.

“Derrel Thomas went up against Gibson one time and held his hands up like this, calling time,” Fairly said. “Then he concentrated on digging a good foothold with his spikes, taking a long time and making a real deep hole.

“When he finished, Gibson yelled down, ‘You’d better dig it deeper!’ Thomas looked up, startled, stepped back and started shoving dirt back into the hole.”

And?

“Didn’t help him, of course,” Fairly said. “He went down anyhow.”

Overheard: Texas Rangers outfielder Pete Incaviglia, to venerable teammate Nolan Ryan: “Hey, Nolan, who was a tougher out for you, Ty Cobb or Rogers Hornsby?”

Trivia time: Who was the first black pitcher to appear in a World Series game?

For the record: Dale Trevillion, producer-director of “One Man Force,” John Matuszak’s last movie, disputes a recent Morning Briefing item reporting that the movie was completed last August.

Trevillion said that shooting was completed late last July but the entire film was not completed until after Christmas.

Matuszak, a former Raider football player, died earlier this month of an accidental overdose of a prescription medicine he was taking for a chronically sore back.

Joy ride: With more and more Eastern Europeans being coveted by the National Basketball Assn., Jan Hubbard of Newsday recalled that the first one, Bulgarian Georgi Glouchkov, failed to make it with the Phoenix Suns in 1985-86, lacking the talent and being unable to adjust culturally.

Hubbard: “Glouchkov, who never learned to speak English and had an interpreter travel with him and the team, developed an insatiable appetite for junk food, most notably Almond Joys. He once was seen consuming seven of them for breakfast on the team bus.”

Trivia answer: Dan Bankhead of Brooklyn. In the 1947 World Series against the New York Yankees, he appeared as a pinch-runner for Bobby Bragan. The first black pitcher to take the mound in a World Series was Satchel Paige of the Cleveland Indians in 1948.

Quotebook: Larry Andersen, deep-thinking Houston Astros reliever, on his goal: “All I want is to have less to do, to have more time to do it in and to get paid more for not getting it done.”