Perhaps Fat Toad Is Considered a Delicacy in Japan

When Yankee owner George Steinbrenner called pitcher Hideki Irabu “a fat toad” during spring training, after Irabu failed to cover first on a routine ground ball, it presented all sorts of problems.

The venerable New York Times had to decide whether to quote Steinbrenner precisely--including the additional off-color adjective Steinbrenner chose.

The Times did, delicately. We won’t.

Now another Manhattan institution, the New Yorker, reports on the difficulty faced by Irabu’s interpreter, George Rose.

How did he translate “fat . . . toad?”

“ ‘The team wanted Hideki to be the best pitcher he could be,’ is all that Rose, choosing his words with characteristic precision, will offer,” writes Adam Platt.

Rose is more comfortable translating such typical lingo as brushback pitch (burasshu-boru), curveball (kabu-boru) or even lactic acid (nyuusan).

Pressed on the toad question, Rose admitted he eventually had to translate more of Steinbrenner’s words for Irabu.

How about koshinuke debu gamagaeru?

That’s spineless fat toad, to you and me.

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More insults: Scottie Pippen’s request to be traded to the Lakers hasn’t been well received in Houston.

Pippen’s brief time in Houston is his “Cup O’Season as a Rocket,” to Fran Blinebury of the Houston Chronicle, and the trade request is “Pippen’s gutless way of admitting he can’t stand the heat of being the main man in the spotlight.”

And Los Angeles?

Just the right place for Pippen to keep collecting on his superstar contract--”while hiding behind the skirts of Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant.”

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Trivia time: Who won the first stroke-play PGA Championship in 1958: Billy Casper, Dow Finsterwald or Sam Snead?

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Parking zone: Joe Hawk of the Las Vegas Review-Journal believes the punishment for the players involved in UCLA’s handicapped-parking scandal should be to have them wear the “wheelchair accessible” symbol on the backs of their football helmets.

“Maybe then, as they demonstrated their physical talents on the field, attention would have been drawn to where these individuals were actually disabled.

“In the head.”

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Trivia answer: Finsterwald, who’d finished second in 1957 in the final year of the match-play format that had been the norm since 1916.

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And finally: While thumbing through an old issue of Vanity Fair at his doctor’s office, Times reader Robert Wilcox stumbled on this pearl in an October 1998 story on Michael Jordan.

Several years after Jordan’s career at North Carolina had ended, he and a friend drove to Chapel Hill to see the Tar Heels play.

They arrived late and the lot was full, but Jordan’s friend spotted a vacant handicapped parking space and quickly pointed it out.

“Oh, no, I couldn’t do that,” Jordan said. “If Coach [Dean] Smith ever knew I had parked in a handicapped zone, he’d make me feel terrible--I wouldn’t be able to face him.”