Fantasy Camp? More Like Reality Camp

The Pittsburgh Pirates have a fantasy baseball camp called “Pirates Dream Week” at the club’s spring training home in Bradenton, Fla.

“The midwinter regimen includes such frills as fielding, hitting and pitching,” writes Peter Leo of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

“I assume it also takes in the basics of being a major league ballplayer--holding out on a contract, tugging your crotch on camera, throwing a tantrum, charging the mound, holding down your lunch while chewing tobacco, spitting with consistency and admiring the majestic arc of your batted ball instead of running to first.”

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Trivia time: Who was UCLA’s first consensus football All-American?

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High anxiety: Tom Chambers, who moved from the Phoenix Suns to the Utah Jazz as a free agent in the off-season, will marry Nicole Paige Hymas, a former “Miss Rodeo Idaho,” in a western-style ceremony on an unspecified Utah mountaintop.

“They want to be very private,” the bride’s mother, Cheryl Hymas, said. “She’s riding up to the altar sidesaddle. We’re trying to figure out what kind of dress doesn’t wrinkle.”

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Right on course: New York Met Manager Dallas Green on his team’s losing 100 games and counting:

“We didn’t back into 100. We came right at it. I didn’t have a number in mind when I came here, but it certainly wasn’t 100.”

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Nostalgia: Ron Borges of the Boston Globe on the state of boxing today in light of the recent blemish on the sport, the disputed decision in the Pernell Whitaker-Julio Cesar Chavez fight:

“All this kind of makes you hunger for the good old days of the Mafia. Then at least everybody knew the score. Even the judges.”

Anyone interested?Chet Coppock of the Chicago Sun-Times writes that even though Wilt Chamberlain is 57, he could still play a limited role in the NBA.

Former referee Earl Strom agrees, saying, “I don’t think there’s a center in the league that could contain Chamberlain in the low post.”

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“Genius” stroke: Stanford’s 41-37 upset of Colorado last Saturday night didn’t come as a surprise to Cardinal Coach Bill Walsh.

At practice last Friday, Walsh noted that Colorado played a fundamental style of defense.

“I always enjoyed . . . playing against those kinds of teams,” Walsh told Art Spander of the San Francisco Examiner. “Because we typically can disorient them a little bit.”

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Trivia answer: End Burr Baldwin in 1946.

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Quotebook Columnist: Bob Verdi of the Chicago Tribune on Bear quarterback Jim Harbaugh: “Only potatoes get sacked more than Harbaugh.”