Dodgers, Angels Might Become Division Rivals

The Dodgers and Angels in the same division of the same league?

An eight-team division that would include all teams in the Pacific and Mountain time zones?

John Harrington, chairman of the Boston Red Sox and the major league realignment committee that met here Tuesday, said it was one of several concepts under consideration for 1998.

“It’s a longshot, a stretch, but it’s possible,” Harrington said of a division that would include the Dodgers, Angels, San Diego Padres, San Francisco Giants, Oakland A’s, Seattle Mariners, Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondbacks.

A 1998 schedule must be presented to the players’ union for approval by Sept. 31, but Harrington said he hopes to have it to the clubs by late August or early September.

As few as two clubs or as many as 14 might be asked to switch leagues and/or divisions, an American League owner said, with any club that is asked to move having veto rights.

The owners initially approved the 1998 assignment of Arizona to the National League West and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays to the American League West and are now trying to correct that bit of curious geography.

With the clock ticking on the ’98 schedule, owners may decide to keep realignment simple--Tampa Bay going to the AL East, Detroit from the East to the Central and Kansas City from the Central to the West--and then initiate a more sweeping realignment in 1999 or later.

It’s not certain which league the proposed eight-team Pacific division--”we’d be very much in favor of it,” an Angel official said--would be part of, but it would require that one league have 16 teams and the other 14.

*

New York Yankee pitcher David Cone said something was missing from the 1997 All-Star game: Kirby Puckett.

“I keep looking around the room for him,” Cone said in the American League clubhouse. “He’s really missed. He magnified the pride factor. He was kind of our captain.”

*

The father of All-Star starting National League pitcher Greg Maddux of the Atlanta Braves has been arrested on a charge of sexual imposition, a third-degree misdemeanor, a Cleveland television station WEWS-TV reported Tuesday night.

The station reported that Maddux’s father, 58-year-old David Maddux, was arrested after a cleaning woman at the Cleveland Marriott Hotel reported that he had made sexual advances toward her.

Maddux was reportedly released on bond. A police dispatcher said she had no information on the arrest.

If convicted, Maddux could face a 60-day jail sentence and a $500 fine.