Some Voters Possibly Off the Mark

Mark McGwire doesn’t dispute the awarding of last season’s National League most-valuable-player award to Sammy Sosa, even though McGwire hit a record 70 home runs to Sosa’s 66.

Finishing second is just fine with McGwire.

But eighth?

“I had no problem with Sammy winning the MVP,” McGwire told Jim Rome on “The Last Word.” “He had a magical year. . . . I was a little miffed by the voting. There was a New York writer that voted me eighth. Was he on another planet? . . . What was he doing that night when he was voting? I don’t know, he must have been drawing out of a fishbowl.”

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More voting: McGwire was also disappointed at getting only two first-place votes.

“I didn’t expect to win,” he told Rome. “But the way the voting came out, I think everyone was a little disturbed by it.”

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Trivia time: If McGwire and Sosa had been named co-MVPs, it would have been only the second time that had occurred in the 67-year history of the award. Who were baseball’s only co-MVPs?

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Hall, but no fame: More than 20 years after his career ended, Orlando Cepeda was finally voted into baseball’s Hall of Fame this week. But, as Cepeda quickly learned, too much time has passed for the honor to mean universal recognition.

Returning in triumph Wednesday to the Scottsdale, Ariz., training camp of the San Francisco Giants, the team he broke in with, Cepeda accommodated those in search of autographs.

But as he moved through the crowd, one autograph seeker was overheard asking, “Who is Orlando Cepeda?”

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He does baseball too? It’s not only the retired Hall of Fame star who experiences recognition problems. Vin Scully is an active Hall of Fame baseball announcer, beginning his 50th year with the Dodgers. One of his duties is to read commercials for a well-known meat company.

Exiting with the players from the Dodger bus for a game against the Padres in San Diego several seasons ago, Scully was spotted by a couple of fans.

“Hey, look,” said one to the other, “it’s the Farmer John dude.”

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His and hers: Playing in an old-timers’ game last week at New York’s Madison Square Garden, former Ranger star Rod Gilbert inadvertently deflected a puck into the stands--and off the forehead of his wife, Judy.

Judy Gilbert was fine after getting several stitches to close the wound. However, she might make her husband feel guilty for a while.

“Great, isn’t it?” she told the New York Post. “His jersey is up in the rafters and his wife is on the floor. All he could say to me was that we’ve now both spilled blood in the Garden.”

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Trivia answer: Willie Stargell of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Keith Hernandez of the St. Louis Cardinals shared the NL MVP award in 1979.

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And finally: The Olympic bribery scandal can also create new Olympic heroes, according to former Olympic swimmer John Nabor, president of U.S. Olympians, an alumni organization.

“The Olympics has always been about what athletes do under the greatest pressure, like the U.S. hockey team beating the Russians in 1980, or [gymnast]) Kerri Strug doing flips on a sprained ankle,” Nabor told Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post.

“[Now] the athletes are seeing the non-athletes who run the Games in their crisis. Now it’s these guys who are under pressure. Let’s see how they perform. . . . Will they look back and say, ‘We were on the Scandal Squad that came through when the Olympics really needed it’?”