Junior Has Some Growing Up to Do

Ken Griffey Jr.’s tendency toward sarcasm and insolence is one of baseball’s better-kept secrets, and it will remain so, because he will spend his career in the smaller media markets of Seattle and Cincinnati.

While he would clean up his act for the national media during All-Star games, Griffey was a handful on a daily basis with the Seattle media. After games, win or lose, Griffey often fled the clubhouse before reporters were allowed in.

One Griffey observer noted that when a game ended, Griffey usually was showered and dressed before the relievers arrived from the bullpen.

It didn’t make him less of a player, easily the best of our generation. Only, perhaps, less of a teammate.

Good riddance: Seattle Times columnist Blaine Newnham wrote recently that he didn’t like Griffey and won’t miss him.

“The first trip into the clubhouse in spring training announced a new and nicer era for the Mariners. Sitting in Griffey’s old spot was Stan Javier, who stood up and introduced himself.

“No longer did you get clubhouse points with your teammates by treating people rudely. No longer was it sport to make reporters grovel for quotes.

“The Mariners--who wouldn’t be in Seattle without him--are strangely better off with him gone. They’ve spent much of the $8 million he would have gotten on pitching. A new, higher sense of priority exists on the team as seen in the willingness of players to advance runners and hit sacrifice flies.

“They can enjoy their new ballpark without worrying whether Junior likes it or not. The Mariners are no longer held hostage by Griffey, living day to day with the threat of his leaving. Nor must they deal with his capricious behavior. Cincinnati does.”

Numbers crunch: The Reds, too, have discovered something in Griffey they might not like.

He was dead serious about taking Tony Perez’s retired No. 24, his number in Seattle, and suggested that all of the other great Reds would have been only too happy to honor the request.

“If I wanted to wear Joe Morgan’s number, he’d say, ‘Sure,’ ” Griffey told writers in Cincinnati.

Not so fast.

The Cincinnati Enquirer checked with Morgan, who would not give it up.

Keeping tabs on Valentine: “Whartongate,” the saga of Bobby Valentine’s fateful address at The Wharton School of Business, has filled New York’s back pages during an extremely critical time: The down period after the opening of the baseball season and before the NBA playoffs.

The timing couldn’t have been better for Mike Hampton.

Murray Chass, national baseball writer for the New York Times, used the occasion to find parallelism in two eras.

“Billy Martin was and Bobby Valentine is one of the most tactically accomplished managers in baseball,” observed Chass. “Both, however, have had damaging ways of undermining their talent. Martin did it and Valentine does it with his mouth. For Martin, it was ingesting alcohol; for Valentine, it is disgorging words.”

The survey says: And that brings us to the Poll of the Week, by the New York Daily News, which asked its readers:

The truce between Bobby Valentine and Steve Phillips will last:

A. A week.

B. The season.

C. Somewhere in between.

If you’re curious, we’ll vote for C and give the knock-down, drag-out with Rickey Henderson another two or three weeks to develop into a full, mutual hatred, thereby casting the organization into further turmoil.

Fish story: The pressure during Cal Ripken Jr.’s iron-man streak wasn’t always on Ripken, Baltimore’s trainers and, a couple of times a year, on New York City’s barely lucid cabbies.

Sometimes, it was on the mayonnaise.

Mike Thalblum, who manages the visitors’ clubhouse at the Oakland Coliseum, recalled too well the times the Orioles came to town with Ripken chasing Lou Gehrig.

“That was like the last thing you’d ever want, to be the reason Cal Ripken missed a game,” Thalblum said. “One day, he asked me, ‘Hey, Mike, when was this tuna made?’ and I said, ‘It’s OK,’ and he ate it. But I was thinking all day that you never really know and it doesn’t really matter when it gets made--it could just be one bad bit.”

Magnetic personality: Recent pain in his left thumb has had Yankee Manager Joe Torre wearing a special glove lined with magnets. It has brought some relief, but is not without some irritating side effects.

“Every time I go to the mound,” Torre said, “[Derek] Jeter wants to know about my bowling team.”

Partners in slime: Isn’t it a matter of time before Phil Regan, seller of the famous Ripken lineup card, and Morris Engelberg, seller of all things DiMaggio, team up?

Bad timing: Don’t invite the Phillies to your wedding. Well, unless you’re marrying one of them, then you’d probably have to.

The team was in Chicago in 1988 for the first scheduled night game in Cub history, in Los Angeles in 1992 when the Rodney King riots broke out, and in Atlanta on Tuesday when John Rocker returned from his suspension.