Vincent Had No Answer for Lockout, Either

Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent was the keynote speaker Thursday at the Associated Press Sports Editors convention in Boston. After his speech, he answered questions from the floor. Some of the topics:

--On gambling, the only offense that carries a ban from the game: “The gambling rule in baseball, somewhat like the rule for street crime in Saudi Arabia (cutting off the offender’s hands), works.”

--On former umpire Dave Pallone’s recent allegations that several major league players are gay, and whether gay players are welcome in the game: “If a gremlin could play second base and play it well, I’m sure we’d have one owner who would sign him.”

--On how he might treat Pete Rose, whose lifetime ban for gambling soon will reach the one-year mark, making him eligible for an appeal: “One of the great insights in life is that one should not decide tomorrow’s questions today.”

Add Vincent: The commissioner also told the editors that he enjoyed a good turn of phrase, recalling a line written late in the career of Irish Meusel, who had long been uncooperative with the press but increasingly cooperative as his retirement approached: “Meusel learned to say hello when it was time to say goodby.”

Trivia time: Thursday’s trivia dealt with the number of Celtic and Laker players in the Basketball Hall of Fame. Can you name the Hall of Famer who played for both teams?

Home-pit advantage: On this day in 1956, USC’s Charlie Dumas became the first person to high-jump seven feet when he cleared 7 feet 0 5/8 inch in the U.S. Olympic trials at the Coliseum.

Who has extras?: Sheri Richardson, 29, of North Myrtle Beach, Va., was the first to have her name picked in this week’s lottery for tickets to the 1991 NCAA basketball Final Four, which drew a record-breaking 143,829 applicants for 47,500 seats at the Indianapolis Hoosier Dome.

She must have been ecstatic, right?

“I’m not really a basketball fan,” Richardson said at a news conference on the front steps of the Hoosier Dome. “I have a friend that goes to Indiana University who I met last summer when we worked in a restaurant. He sent me the application and said this would be a chance for me to come up and visit him.”

Her friend, graduate student Dave Milne of Fort Wayne, Ind., said: “I hope she lets me use the second ticket. Maybe I’ll take it now so that if we’re not still friends, she won’t give it to someone else.”

The modern game: Johnny Pesky, 70, hired Wednesday to manage the Boston Red Sox’s triple-A Pawtucket franchise, revealed how he’ll handle the struggling PawSox: “I like to let the player do what he can and we go from there. I’m not going to make any changes. I think the product is there.”

Up everyone’s alley: Looking for a bowling league? Mario Fox of the Associated Press reports that Marigold Lanes, located three blocks from Wrigley Field on Chicago’s North Side, has 30 leagues. Among them are a Japanese league, a Puerto Rican league, a janitors’ league, a gay league, a lesbian league, a tavern league, four hospital leagues, a children’s “bumper” league (no gutter balls), black leagues and an advertising league.

There’s also a league called the Marigold Straits. Said one of its members, architect Fred Schmidt: “We had a gay league bowling in front of us and another after us. We just wanted to define ourselves, but we spell it differently.”

Trivia answer: Clyde Lovellette, with the Minneapolis Lakers in 1953-57 and the Boston Celtics in 1962-64.

Quotebook: Pittsburgh Pirate pitcher Walt Terrell, after hearing that Nolan Ryan had pitched his sixth no-hitter despite a broken bone in his back: “I’ll try it. First I’ll have to find out what bone I have to break, then I’ll just jump off a building.”