Giants’ Snow Has to Play Tight Defense

San Francisco Giant fans might be gloating over the team’s new home, Pac Bell Park, but it doesn’t mean the players will be entirely pleased with it.

Three-time Gold Glove winner J.T. Snow, for one, will find his range more limited, according to Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Examiner.

“Candlestick, as you know, had more foul ground than Delaware has ground,” Ratto wrote, “and Snow, being no wobbling hulk, took away a good game-and-a-half’s worth of outs just by ranging 15 to 20 feet to his left and taking routine fouls out of the sky.”

Not any more.

In Pac Bell Park, Ratto said, “he will find fairly quickly that Mister Wall comes up hard and fast to the unwary traveler.

“You may want to check back with Snow the first time he has to pull brickwork out of his bridgework.”

*

Trivia time: What did Parnelli Jones call his old Indianapolis 500 roadster?

*

Bitter Lemons: With the NCAA tournament in full swing, Blackie Sherrod of the Dallas Morning News recalls that coach Abe Lemons once invented a new statistic for one of his Oklahoma City players--the half-rebound.

“That’s when he gets the ball off the backboard and somebody takes it away from him,” Lemons explained.

*

Dating game: At the Rocky Mountain News, Mike Littwin ponders a lofty question:

“If Rick Fox ends up with Vanessa Williams, who does Kobe Bryant get?”

*

That’s not nice: Over at the Denver Post, meanwhile, Jim Armstrong has a different query:

“Was that 61-point game Shaq laid on the Clippers the other night the most ever against a CBA team?”

*

Approach shots: Golf Digest Woman features a report in its debut issue on the differences between men and women on the course.

The magazine’s poll of golfers found that women rate husbands as their second-favorite partners on the links but prefer a friend. Men, it seems, would rather play with “almost anyone” than their wives.

Unless their wife is, say, Australian sensation Karrie Webb.

*

Trivia answer: Old Calhoun.

*

And finally: Nick Canepa of the San Diego Union-Tribune warns everyone against following his NCAA tournament picks:

“You’re looking at a guy who took France and the points against Germany during World War II.”