Bulls Have a Play for When It’s Beyond ‘Hail Mary’ Time

When it comes to crunch time, Chicago Bull Coach Phil Jackson said the team goes to what assistant coach John Bach calls the Archangel Offense.

Jackson: “That’s where we give the ball to Michael Jordan and say, ‘Save us, Michael.’ ”

Add Jordan: TNT analyst Doug Collins, who coached the Bulls last season, told the Philadelphia Daily News: “I love Dennis Rodman, but Michael plays tougher defense than Dennis. If you polled the NBA guards and asked them to pick the man they’d least like to have guarding them in the last 24 seconds of a game, I bet most of them would pick Michael.”

Trivia time: What do New York Yankee infielder Wayne Tolleson, Washington Redskin assistant coach Jim Hanifan and Edmonton Eskimo General Manager Hugh Campbell have in common?

Now-it-can-be-told dept.: Cleveland first baseman Keith Hernandez, who also starred as a point guard in basketball and a quarterback in football as a prep in San Bruno, Calif., told Sheldon Ocker of the Akron Beacon-Journal: “Stanford invited me to see its baseball team and its spring practice football game.

“Jim Plunkett was their quarterback. I remember seeing some of those defensive linemen and saying, ‘I don’t think so.’ ”

Happy warrior: Cleveland Indian Manager John McNamara, on ESPN’s late-night baseball games: “I love ‘em. I go home, have myself a scotch and water, Oreo cookies and milk, watch the whole game and fall asleep on the couch.”

Big numbers: Ever wonder what players like Bob Feller and Ted Williams would have done if they hadn’t gone to war and if they had played 162-game seasons? According to USA Today, Ralph Winnie has figured it out in a book called “What If.”

Winnie figures that Feller, who enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor and served 3.8 seasons in the Navy, would have won 373 games instead of 266. And he would have totaled 3,832 strikeouts instead of 2,581.

Williams, who also served in Korea and missed 4.7 seasons, is projected to 2,542 runs batted in instead of 1,839. That’s far more than Henry Aaron’s record of 2,229.

Add Feller: He was a chief petty officer on the aircraft carrier USS Alabama, which had a crew of 2,900--six times the population of Feller’s hometown of Van Meter, Iowa.

No relief: From Ralph Branca, still haunted by Bobby Thomson’s historic home run in 1951: “You know, if you kill somebody, they sentence you to life, you serve 20 years and you get paroled. I’ve never been paroled.” The irony is that Dennis Eckersley seems to get hardly any notice for surrendering the big one to Kirk Gibson.

Trivia answer: All three won NCAA pass receiving titles--Tolleson (Western Carolina) 1977, Hanifan (California) 1954, and Campbell (Washington State) 1960-61.

Quotebook: Cleveland catcher Sandy Alomar Jr., after working a game with pitcher Tom Candiotti: “If you want to know how it feels to catch the knuckleball, ask the backstop, not me.”