All of Them Tend to Cringe Near the Wall

Indy car drivers will play against drag racers in a charity softball game for flood victims on Sept. 16 in Reading, Pa., and already the two sides have started their bench jockeying.

“The dragsters will win because half the Indy car drivers can’t walk and the other half can’t speak English,” said top fuel driver Kenny Bernstein, who is also an Indy car owner.

To which former Indy 500 winner Rick Mears replied: “The drag racers won’t score against us. They’ll keep running straight down the first base line because they don’t know how to turn left.”

Add softball: The drag racers will have a secret weapon in Jack Clark, the former Boston Red Sox slugger, who owns the Taco Bell Express top-fuel dragster driven by John Andretti.

Trivia time: Which U.S. horse racing track had the highest daily average attendance last year?

Too much, too soon: ESPN’s John Feinstein asks: “When is the Women’s Tennis Assn. going to realize it’s killing the game by allowing girls to turn pro so young?”

Time will come: When Rossey Weeks, a Rockford Peach catcher in the 1950s, captured the players’ love for their fading game in a poem she read during a Hall of Fame enshrinement for women’s baseball, a young stadium attendant said:

“Old lady, you’re playing ball in the windmills of your mind.”

Said Weeks: “He will learn. Everyone gets a turn to look back into the past.”

And baseball, too: Texas Ranger fans got a strip show performed in a private suite along with their game against the Chicago White Sox one night last week. The game was interrupted in the top of the fourth inning by the unusual side show.

A woman, dressed in a pink, polka-dot bikini, removed the garment while standing in the window of a luxury box between third base and home plate at Arlington Stadium. Ranger officials said it took them about seven minutes to get a security officer up to the suite. The woman was ejected from the ballpark.

Ugly American: Brett Perriman, Detroit Lion wide receiver, who played an exhibition in London in 1990 with the New Orleans Saints, says he would rather pay a $10,000 fine than return to England.

“The food is terrible,” he said. “The hamburgers at McDonald’s taste like soybeans.”

Could be worse: Toronto’s Joe Carter, after watching bottles, batteries and other debris being thrown by Yankee Stadium fans at the Blue Jays:

“I’m just glad it wasn’t bat night.”

Trivia answer: Del Mar, with 35,384, including off-track attendance.

Quotebook: Sportscaster Tony Femino, commenting on KMPC about the Nolan Ryan vs. Robin Ventura tussle on the mound the other night: “Bad enough that this is a 26-year-old male named Robin, but here he is charging one of the legends of the game of baseball.”