Managerial Style Would Leave Him Beside Himself

Ray Miller, the new manager of the Baltimore Orioles, broke into management at age 28 as a manager-coach-pitcher in Venezuelan winter ball in 1973.

That prompted the Washington Post’s Thomas Boswell to recall a Miller quote from those early days.

“I’d visit the pitcher on the mound, send myself to the bullpen, warm myself up, visit the pitcher again, replace him with myself, pitch, visit with myself, signal to warm up a lefty because I was in trouble, call a coach out to calm me down, give the ball to the new pitcher and send myself to the showers,” Miller said.

“Then the other guy would get shelled worse than I did and I’d have to explain afterward why I couldn’t pitch, coach or manage.”

*

Trivia time: Magic Johnson’s No. 32 was retired by the Lakers. Which other four Lakers wore No. 32?

*

How does he really feel? Tennessee, Louisiana Tech, Stanford, Connecticut, Virginia and Georgia long have dominated women’s college basketball.

So much so that it caused Milton Kent of the Baltimore Sun to fashion this lead paragraph in his season preview:

“Historically, it’s been harder to find guests on the ‘Jerry Springer’ show who have self-respect or people who have emerged from a Pauly Shore movie without a paper bag on their heads than to find new members of the women’s college basketball elite.”

*

Up in smoke: Benfica of Portugal, one of the world’s leading soccer clubs, elected a new board of directors this month. Nothing odd about that, but when the incoming board members checked the books, they were stopped short.

Seems that in the past six months alone, the ousted directors had spent $26,000--on cigars.

*

All fired up: Perhaps the Portuguese would like to know there is a U.S. company--no free ads here--that makes a putter that can hold as many as four 6 1/2-inch cigars in the shaft.

Then again, they might not find that humidorous.

*

No nonsense: New Tampa Bay Lightning Coach Jacques Demers gave his players an icy welcome.

“The fans have been cheated here by the players here and that’s the end of it,” Demers said at his introductory news conference last week. “The majority of the players are letting the fans down.

“How many games we are going to win? I don’t know, but the cheating stops today. It stops right now. It’s not phony, it’s the truth. Some of these players are six months away from being out of the NHL.”

Ouch.

*

Trivia answer: Jim Krebs, Jerry Grote, Cazzie Russell and Bill Bridges.

*

And finally A Pikesville, Md., pizza outlet made the mistake of promising a dollar off for every sack made by the often-anemic Baltimore Raven defense.

So what happened? The Ravens sacked Philadelphia quarterback Bobby Hoying nine times Sunday, dropping the cost of a large pizza to $1.69.

“This is crazy,” said a fan who waited 3 1/2 hours for his order. “I had more fun today waiting for my pizza than I did at the game.”