These Little Leaguers Get Surprise Encore

Here’s another Little League scandal.

This one involves the grown-ups at ESPN.

The Little League champions from Tokyo went to the New York Met game Monday, and television cameras captured them enjoying a playful visit with outfielder Tsuyoshi Shinjo before the game.

When Shinjo made a nice catch in the fourth inning, the cameras showed them applauding from the stands.

And when Shinjo’s home run tied the score in the eighth, ESPN’s “SportsCenter” showed the Little Leaguers cheering again. “The kids love him!” anchor Steve Berthiaume said.

One big problem.

It was a crock, the New York Post’s Phil Mushnick reports. The Little Leaguers already had left the game.

“The clip of the kids applauding Shinjo’s homer, although presented to a national audience as the kicker in a chronological sequence, did not occur as reported by ‘SportsCenter,”’ Mushnick writes. “In fact, the clip shown of the kids applauding Shinjo’s eighth-inning homer seemed to be the same clip of the kids applauding his fourth-inning catch, only it was blown up a bit to make it appear slightly different.”

ESPN owned up to its error faster than your run-of-the-mill birth-certificate forger.

“We shouldn’t have done it,” Norby Williamson, vice president for “SportsCenter” production, told the Post. “It was a mistake, not one representative of the work we do, day in and day out, but that doesn’t change anything--it shouldn’t have happened.”

Right, 12 years old, 14 years old; fourth inning, eighth inning.

People are so uptight sometimes.

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Trivia time: Mickey Mantle set the major league record for home runs by a switch-hitter with 54 in 1961. Who are the two other switch-hitters who have hit more than 40?

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Mile-high money: Quit the fussing about whether the Denver Broncos’ new stadium should be referred to by its corporate name, Invesco Field at Mile High.

Just name the $401-million stadium Pat Bowlen’s Sky-High Stack of Cash.

“For putting in only $100 million of the construction cost, Bowlen gets the lion’s share of the loot: potentially more than $40 million a year from suites, club seats, concession stands, parking and stadium advertising [including $3 million a year from Invesco],” Forbes magazine writes.

“For their $301 million, the taxpayers get $3 million a year from Invesco and a place to host rehearsal dinners and bar mitzvahs, in addition to Bronco games.”

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More stadiums: A 20-month, $93 million expansion and renovation has boosted the capacity of Beaver Stadium, Penn State’s home field, by 11,000 seats to 106,537, making it the second-largest college stadium in the country behind Michigan’s 107,501.

“It’s like going from a Piper Cub to a 747,” said Lou Prato, director of the new Penn State All-Sports Museum inside the stadium. “We used to be a mom-and-pop operation. Now we’re a big, fancy supermarket.”

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Broadcast news: Kansas City sports radio hosts Don Fortune and Jim Rose replayed an interview with the Royals’ Carlos Febles during their afternoon show on KMBZ this week, asking listeners to call in and “translate” Febles’ heavily accented English.

“What I couldn’t believe was they were offering two tickets to a game for someone to ‘translate’ it,” listener Max Cerda told the Kansas City Star.

The attempt at humor wasn’t funny, Joe Arce, publisher of the Kansas City Hispanic News, told the Star.

“That sort of thing tends to discourage people from trying to learn English,” he said.

Fortune said he didn’t mean to offend anyone.

“I admire Carlos for what he has done, for being able to speak two languages,” Fortune said. “It was just a fun bit.... It was never our intention to make fun of him or ridicule him. If that’s the way it came across, I truly apologize.”

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Trivia answer: Chipper Jones, who hit 45 in 1999, and Todd Hundley, who had 41 in 1996.

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And finally: New Miami Coach Larry Coker, 53, on Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden approaching Bear Bryant’s record of 323 victories: “I’m after the same record as they are. I’m just getting a later start.”