One Is All-Star Ambassador, the Other Just an . . .

Baseball players picked for the All-Star game react in different ways.

Colorado’s Dante Bichette, after being voted a starter for the first time: “I wish I could take every fan who voted for me to the All-Star game with me. I hope I play 20 more years for this club.”

San Francisco’s Barry Bonds, after being selected for the fifth time: “I’m happy, but I don’t want to talk about it. . . . You guys [reporters] go out and get the same quotes from the other times I made it.”

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Trivia time: Who was the first athlete to win a gold medal in both the Summer and Winter Olympic Games?

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Sound reasoning: Hawaii’s Yuval Katz, volleyball’s college player of the year, eats two energy bars before every game.

“He thinks they taste lousy [but] he thinks it helps his team win,” revealed David Kraft in Volleyball magazine.

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Quicker too: Virtually no one believes that penalty kicks are the best way to settle a European Championship soccer semifinal or a World Cup final. But what is better?

When Lennart Johansson, president of European soccer’s governing body, asked for alternative ideas, one suggested that, instead of having the match, teams could save a lot of time by going straight to penalty kicks.

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Climbing high: Lee Barnes gained fame in the 1924 Olympics when he won the pole vault as a 17-year-old Hollywood High student. Three years later he used his talent in a practical way.

As a stand-in for comedian Buster Keaton in the movie “College,” Barnes appeared in a scene that required him to vault into a second-story window.

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Placing the blame: Italy, whose soccer team reached the World Cup final in 1994 before losing to Brazil, was eliminated in the first round of the European Championships, and the Italian press is taking it out on the coach, Arrigo Sacchi.

“He’s brought our football to the point of a burning mortification: that of leaving a 16-team European championship at the first round,” wrote Candido Cannavo, editor of La Gazzetta dello Sport.

“Italy’s elimination bears the stamp of the enormous sin of pride felt by the coach and transmitted to the squad with devastating psychological consequences.”

How about that, Bob Knight?

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Second place: Rochelle Stevens, the only American woman to make the 400-meter final at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, still bristles at the criticism she endured after losing the lead as the anchor on the 1,600 relay team.

“If you’re not a gold-medal winner, you’re nothing,” she told the Baltimore Sun. “I won a silver, and all I got was criticism.”

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Trivia answer: Eddie Eagan, who won the light-heavyweight boxing championship in 1920 at Antwerp and 12 years later was a member of the winning U.S. bobsled team at Lake Placid, N.Y.

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And finally: In response to a missed squeeze sign by shortstop Kurt Abbott, Florida Marlin Manager Rene Lachemann said: “If they want to test my patience, I’m going to test their checkbooks.”