Bowden’s Wife Calls Audible--Six Is Enough for This Team

Bobby Bowden, football coach at Florida State, can remember what he said to his wife Ann after the births of each of their six children--a girl, four boys and another girl.

“When (she) presented me with our first child, I said, ‘This is our cheerleader.’ As our sons came after that I said, ‘This is our quarterback, this is our center,’ and so on. When the sixth child came, Ann said, ‘This is the end.’ ”

Trivia time: According to Baseball America, only six players with last names 13-letters long have made it to the major leagues. Name one. (Hint: One is currently in the American League.)

One to forget: From the box-scores-from-hell file comes news of the April 27 Pacific Coast League game between Tacoma and Albuquerque, the Dodgers’ triple-A farm club. Albuquerque won, 21-5, and it’s easy to see why.

Tacoma starter Jeff Musselman pitched 4 1/3 innings, allowed 14 hits, nine earned runs, walked one and struck out one. “Relief” pitcher Johnny Guzman was worse. He lasted 3 2/3 innings, allowed 14 hits, 12 earned runs, walked two and struck out one.

Said Dodger scout Jerry Stephenson: “The best thing you could say about Tacoma was that Musselman has a Harvard degree.”

If he keeps pitching like that, he’ll need it. Soon.

What’s in a name: Strange but true.

Someone from Guidelines, the official magazine of the College Football Assn., actually compiled a list of the 106 Division I-A nicknames and then organized the names according to 16 different categories.

Sixteen of the 106 schools used feline-related nicknames (Kentucky Wildcats, for example), followed by military-warrior (15 schools), birds (13), canines (8), clawed animals (8), laborers (8), Indians (7), state terminology (7), weather-natural conditions (7), hoofed animals (6), aquatic creatures (3), Satanic figures (3), colors (2), aircraft (1), footwear (1) and insects (1).

The aircraft? The Toledo Rockets.

The insect? The Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets.

The footwear? The Akron Zips, who got their name from a pair of overshoes called “Zippers.”

Glass slipper alert: Larry Wigge, hockey writer for the Sporting News, listed five reasons why Pittsburgh would beat Minnesota for the Stanley Cup championship.

Reason No. 5: “Finally, it’s midnight and Cinderella has lost her magic touch. Only two sub-.500 teams have won a Stanley Cup title--Chicago in 1938 and Toronto in 1949. A victory by Minnesota, which was 27-39-14 in the regular season, would send the National Hockey League scrambling for a way to ensure that this won’t happen again, further diminishing the importance of the regular season.

“Or does the NHL really care?”

Trivia answer: Oakland pitcher Kirk Dressendorfer. The other five players: Ossee Schreckengost, Lou Schiappacasse, Gene DeMontreville, Lee DeMontreville and Ken Raffensberger.

Quotebook: Gordon Lakey, a scout for the Toronto Blue Jays, on the early problems of the new Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox: “It took more time standing in line for a program . . . than it did the day before standing in line for a $125-million lottery in California.”