This Supply of More Lore Misguided

You can’t always tell the players without a scorecard, but you can learn more than you want to know from the team media guide.

And Pacific 10 Conference football teams are making sure the 2000 season will be the year of information.

For example, Washington State’s guide is 224 pages, nearly twice the size of last year’s book and the largest football media guide produced at the school.

Other tomes weighing in include USC at 392 pages, Washington at 340, UCLA at 316, Oregon State at 264, Stanford at 242, Arizona State at 232, Oregon at 216 and Arizona at 196.

Cal is the model of brevity at 188 pages.

But even USC stops short of the information overload at Florida, whose book comes in at 400 pages, 52 more than last season’s Gator guide.

Don’t try to download from the Internet.

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Trivia time: Who holds the record for giving up the most grand slams in major league history?

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Mr. Front Row: Bob Uecker, in his 30th season as the Milwaukee Brewers’ broadcaster, will be honored before today’s home game against St. Louis.

Uecker told Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel writer Tom Haudricourt he wasn’t worth all the fuss.

“I just don’t feel I deserve anything like that,” Uecker said. “It’s an honor and all that, but I’m embarrassed by stuff like that. But my family is glad and I’m sure other people are glad. It’s a very nice thing they’re doing.”

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There’s a pattern here: Philadelphia Daily News columnist John Smallwood had little sympathy for the latest round of legal trouble former Dallas Cowboy receiver Michael Irvin found himself in.

“Irvin said he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and perhaps he truly was just a victim of an unfortunate circumstance,” Smallwood said. “But come on, isn’t it time for Irvin, whose rap sheet includes a felony cocaine-possession charge in 1996, to stop inserting himself into those wrong places at the wrong times?”

On Friday, authorities decided not to charge Irvin.

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Strange but true: Steve Rosenbloom of the Chicago Tribune notes “a company called Carrier International trades on Nasdaq as CONE, and it has gone from $35 a share to below $9 in roughly the same time that Yankee pitcher David Cone has gone 2-10 this season.”

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Free at last: Think Regan Upshaw was happy to leave the Jacksonville Jaguars for the Oakland Raiders?

Upshaw, a defensive end who has also played for Tampa Bay, was overjoyed--at least at the prospect of no longer being under the thumb of Jacksonville Coach Tom Coughlin.

“It was like boot camp; every player has to be under his control,” Upshaw told the San Jose Mercury News. “It just wasn’t my style of coaching. That’s just not the type of person that I am, and I don’t thrive in that type of environment.”

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Trivia answer: Nolan Ryan, 10.

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And finally: Newsday’s Jon Heyman, on the difference between the 1996 Yankees who won the World Series, and this year’s team: “That 1996 team overachieved. This one has overspent.”