His Appeal No Secret to Ripken’s Young Fans

Cal Ripken Jr. is much more than baseball’s iron man, says Phil Arvia of the Chicago Daily Southtown. He is a philosopher.

“From the outside, you look at [signing autographs] as work and [wonder] what’s so fun about signing your name till your finger hurts,” Ripken told him. “But if you look at the inside of it, you look at what happens on the inside of that exchange.

“I discovered early on that there was a secret exchange when you did an autograph. You could actually see a little one’s face light up, you could actually have some power in their happiness.”

Trivia time: Who hit the first home run in an All-Star game?

Praising Paul: The Dodgers’ Paul Lo Duca wasn’t selected for today’s All-Star game, but this is how Lyle Spencer of the Riverside Press-Enterprise feels about the versatile catcher:

“Without Lo Duca’s all-purpose game and personality, the Dodgers would be so far out of the NL West race, they couldn’t find Arizona with a map.”

Movie reviews: From Jeff Wolf of the Las Vegas Review-Journal: “Hear about the sequel to ‘Driven’? It’s called ‘Parked.’ ”

From Bill Center of the San Diego Union-Tribune: “A better name for ‘Driven’ would have been ‘Drivel.’ ”

Quotable: Tennis great Martina Navratilova, as quoted in the Reader’s Digest: “The moment of victory is much too short to live for that and nothing else.”

So what: When someone said All-Star starting pitcher Roger Clemens would never win any popularity contests, New York Yankee Manager Joe Torre countered:

“I don’t need for everybody to like Roger Clemens. That’s not required. I don’t want other teams to be too comfortable with him.”

Nothing funny: Funny car champion John Force says he has two pet peeves:

“Guys who put fishing hooks in their hats, and those cameras that don’t take the picture right away.

“When you reach to sign a hat, the hook sticks you. And when they take your picture and click the camera, it doesn’t take your picture right away, so they’re upset that I’ve got this weird look on my face. I don’t have time to hold my pose forever.”

Fair warning: Comedian Garry Shandling says, “Never try to pick up a woman who is wearing a Super Bowl ring.”

Politically correct: Fidel Castro, after welcoming home Cuba’s national boxing team, which had won seven gold medals at the world amateur boxing championships in Belfast, called the tournament “the most impartial that I have seen.”

Castro was not there.

Good old days: Four old pals, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Lee Trevino and Chi Chi Rodriguez, kept spectators laughing as they chatted away during a charity skins game in Omaha.

“What you saw today is how the senior tour started,” Rodriguez said. “Now, with so much money on the senior tour, it’s lost the camaraderie.”

Attention, Pete Rose: According to British bookmaker William Hill, cyclist Lance Armstrong bet 1,000 pounds ($1,400) on himself to win his third Tour de France.

If he wins, Armstrong will make a profit of 533 pounds ($746).

Trivia answer: Babe Ruth, 38, in his next-to-last year as a Yankee, hit a two-run shot in the third inning of the inaugural 1933 game. The American League won, 4-2.

And finally: America Online columnist Norman Chad: “It used to be, if you were a resident alien or a resident teenager, you’d go to 7-Eleven looking for work. Now it’s the NBA.”