Cage Escapes Nittany Lions, Attacks Man

Matt Allison, an assistant baseball coach at Cornell, was nearly run over by, of all things, a runaway batting cage.

In an April 19 game played at Penn State, a batting cage became mobile when nudged by wind gusts of up to 36 m.p.h.

“I didn’t see it until it was five or six feet away,” said Allison, who was in the first base coaching box. “I’ve had no formal training on how to field that kind of play.”

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Trivia time: Who holds the major league record for most runs batted in in a month?

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Sister act: While growing up in Riverside, Reggie Miller was always second best in basketball to sister Cheryl.

“I remember the first big game he had in high school,” father Saul Miller said. “He had something like 39 points and he came in the house acting big.

“That was the night he found out his sister had scored 105 the same night.”

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Lee who? Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley played together in a celebrity skins game for charity on Thursday in Birmingham, Ala.

Lee Trevino, who played in the same group, said it was the most relaxing day he has had in a long while.

“Nobody wanted my autograph. Everybody wanted Jordan’s and Barkley’s,” Trevino said.

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Frenzy in France: The French treated Mary Pierce as if she were the second coming of Jeanne d’Arc. “Saint Mary,” one headline said. “A Sacred Day,” another proclaimed the morning of the women’s final of the French Open.

The French sports daily l’Equipe reported that French television hooked a heart monitor to Pierce’s mother, Yannick, during the final. The reason? They wanted to report Yannick’s pulse rate during Pierce’s match against eventual champion Arantxa Sanchez Vicario.

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Looking back: On this day in 1944, seaman first class Yogi Berra was on a landing craft support ship in the invasion of Normandy.

Berra, the Hall of Fame catcher with the New York Yankees, referred to the LCSS as “Landing craft suicide squad” in an interview with Newsday.

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Trivia answer: Hack Wilson of the Chicago Cubs, with 53 in August of 1930, on his way to his record 190 RBIs that season.

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Quotebook: Barkley when asked on CNN why he plays golf: “Most people who play golf are rich and stuck up. So they leave me alone.”