For Kuntz, Baseball Like Watching Grass Grow

If that fellow mowing the grass and trimming the palm trees at the Florida Marlins’ training facility in Melbourne, Fla., seems familiar, he should. He’s a World Series winner and, until a week or so ago, he was one of the team’s coaches.

Rusty Kuntz, whose seventh-inning sacrifice fly provided the game-winning RBI in the final game of the 1984 World Series for the Detroit Tigers, was one of the 60 employees fired by the Marlins last week when new ownership took over.

“It’s a way to get out of the house,” Kuntz said of the gardening chores he has been doing voluntarily each off-season since 1993. “I’m not a hobby guy or a golfer or a fisherman. I just prune trees, and I like being outside watching grass grow.”

Now, at least until he lands another baseball job, he’s doing it full time.

“This is the first time in 26 years I haven’t been to a spring training camp,” Kuntz said. “That’s the hard part about it.”

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Trivia time: Of the NBA’s all-time top 10 rebound leaders, only one is still active. Who is he?

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Round 1: In giving a generally thumbs-down review to the movie “Ali,” which recently opened in England, Kevin Mitchell of the Observer said reality movies about boxing usually fail.

“It is an unreal sport, leaning heavily toward pastiche,” he said. “You only have to watch the antics of Mike Tyson to understand why boxing is rarely more than a press conference away from farce.”

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Round 2: Mitchell listed his top 10 boxing movies of all time, including in the list “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” which, he said, “handed Paul Newman one of the great lines.

“When asked if he wanted a protective cup, he replied: ‘I’ll drink from the bottle like the rest of the boys.’”

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Stat so? The first home run that Todd Zeile hits for his new club, the Colorado Rockies, will give him at least one homer for nine teams.

Since 1900, only two other players, Tommy Davis and Dave Martinez, have matched that, according to the Society For American Baseball Research, which keeps track of this sort of thing.

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Signature tune: Pedro Martinez has three Cy Young awards sitting on his shelf at home, but he has something else just as prized: a football signed by the New England Patriots before the NFL season they ended with an upset victory over the St. Louis Rams in the Super Bowl.

“I was rooting for them,” Martinez told Baseball Weekly, “because that’s the only team I’ve got a signed ball from.”

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Looking back: On this day in 1985, Indiana basketball Coach Bob Knight was ejected five minutes into a game against Purdue for throwing a chair across the court.

After the Hoosiers were assessed two fouls, Knight got a technical. Then while Purdue was shooting the free throw, Knight picked up a chair from the bench area and threw it across the court, earning his second technical. Indiana lost the game, 72-63.

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Trivia answer: Karl Malone, who still needs more than 10,000 more to catch Wilt Chamberlain.

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And finally: From Bill Scheft in ESPN the Magazine: “In other football news, Bill Parcells’ wife of 40 years filed for divorce. Sad story. She walked in on somebody tampering with him.”

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Grahame L. Jones