AROUND THE AL : Velarde Has Fattened Up on Pitching

Besides taking those shots at the Angels and expressing gratitude for being traded to the Oakland Athletics, second baseman Randy Velarde has continued to take aim at opposing pitchers in the best season of his career.

He has a career-high 60 runs batted in, a .347 average in 28 games with his new team and leads the American League with 41 hits in August.

There is one other number that has the A’s talking, and that is Velarde’s 7% body fat.

“The guy’s going to freeze to death,” first baseman Jason Giambi said. “Check him out. He’s got no body fat. He’s going to get a paper cut and bleed to death.”

Said conditioning coach Bob Alejo, “The guy’s got to wear a comforter around the locker room. He’s got nothing on his body to keep him warm.”

While with the New York Yankees, Velarde recalled winning a “fat-off” with Rickey Henderson, the legendary lean machine.

“I was one-tenth of a percentage point lower than Rickey,” Velarde recalled. “Rickey was not happy. He called for a second measurement, and the result was the same.”

Reconstructive elbow surgery wiped out Velarde’s 1997 and ’98 seasons with the Angels, but his current physical condition has him thinking he is “36 going on 26” and he is “up for grabs” as a free agent at the end of the year.

He also thinks some of his teammates could acquire lean waistlines “if they mixed in a salad and stayed away from the cheeseburgers.”

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Art Howe, Velarde’s manager, was suspicious of the Cleveland Indians after Manny Ramirez hit three home runs against the A’s Wednesday.

“They circumvented the rules,” Howe said. “They had Ramirez at bat every inning, didn’t they?”

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The Tampa Bay Devil Rays staged a day in honor of Wade Boggs and his 3,000 hits last Sunday.

Among the guests was Dick Beradino, who was Boggs’ first manager at Elmira, N.Y., in 1976 and who wasn’t very impressed at the time. Boggs fielded poorly and batted only .263. Beradino said the young third baseman simply hadn’t adopted his all-chicken diet yet.

“There weren’t a lot of places to eat after games in those small towns,” Beradino noted. “The players used to eat a lot at McDonalds. I told Wade, ‘The reason you didn’t hit that well is because they hadn’t invented Chicken McNuggets yet. You only had Big Macs. You might have hit 100 points higher if they’d had Chicken McNuggets.’ ”

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Did the Texas Rangers make the right moves last year in allowing Will Clark to leave as a free agent and reacquiring Rafael Palmeiro as one?

Clark, on the disabled list for the seventh time since 1996, had season-ending elbow surgery Thursday, finishing his first season with the Baltimore Orioles with 10 homers and 29 runs batted in, the equivalent of a good month for Palmeiro.

Palmeiro has 15 homers and 38 runs batted in for August and is second in the league with 40 homers and 126 RBIs. He also had 24 homers at The Ballpark in Arlington, where Clark never hit more than 11 in any of his five seasons with the Rangers.

Clark, 35, said he has essentially played with a broken elbow since 1996 and is looking forward to an injury-free 2000, when he is owed $5.5 million in the second year of a two-year contract with the Orioles.