BASEBALL PLAYOFF NOTES : Pirates Cry Foul on Tickets

Reds majority owner Marge Schott got a nice seat Monday at Three Rivers Stadium--much nicer than some of the Pirates would have given her.

Several Pirates were upset at the poor seating for their families when the playoffs opened in Cincinnati. Some Pirates received only one ticket each between the foul lines and another in the deep recesses of the center field upper deck.

“What am I supposed to do, let my little girl sit by herself in center field?” Pirates reliever Ted Power asked.

“She is the cheapest person I’ve ever met in the game of baseball,” catcher Mike LaValliere said of Schott. “ . . . It’s the kind of thing where Marge doesn’t care about her own players, and she’s definitely not going to care about the other team’s players. When we get back to Pittsburgh, if it was my choice, I would set Marge up in the upper deck all by herself.”

Schott got much better treatment than that. She got a first-row seat right behind the Reds’ dugout and Reds players were given complimentary box seat tickets, some of them immediately behind home plate.

Schott said the Pirates got poor tickets because the Reds sell so many season tickets.

“I don’t care if we sell 15,000 season tickets, we’ll never be like that,” Pirates President Carl Barger said.

The great debate in Boston concerns the premature--say the natives--hook used by Manager Joe Morgan in the first two games.

Morgan removed Roger Clemens with a 1-0 lead after six on Saturday and Dana Kiecker tied 1-1 after 5 2/3 on Sunday. The bullpen was charged with eight runs in Game 1 and three in Game 2.

Neither pitcher exactly complained, although Kiecker said, “I didn’t think he was coming to pull me, to be honest. I thought he was coming out to recommend this or that. If I had known he was coming to pull me out, I might have tried to fight a little harder.”