It’s Not Exactly the House That Ruth Built

Humorist Dave Barry had this to say about Pro Player Stadium, home of the National League champion Florida Marlins and host of two World Series since it was built in 1987:

“You want mystique? You want tradition? You want history? You want a goat in a baseball jersey running loose in the parking lot? You want the possibility that a fan will be killed by a foul ball while sitting in a hot tub? Pro Player Stadium has some of these qualities, and more.”

Trivia time: Roger Clemens of the New York Yankees went into his start Wednesday in Game 4 of the World Series with a sparkling lifetime 3-0 record in the Fall Classic. Who holds the record for most World Series victories?

Quarterback controversy: Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle on the Oakland Raiders’ choice between an injured Rich Gannon or an untested Marques Tuiasosopo: “The bye week comes at a very bad time for [Coach Bill] Callahan, given the Raiders’ pathological inability to answer a simple question simply. Plainly, Al Davis hasn’t decided yet who he wants his quarterback to be, or at the very least, Callahan has not sufficiently divined Al’s intent as regarding the quarterback.”

Double-secret probation: David Skorton, president of the University of Iowa, isn’t pleased with the “uncivil and dangerous behavior” of Hawkeye fans.

“Although we have been advised by legal counsel that it would be unconstitutional to ban vulgar T-shirts from Kinnick Stadium, that does not mean that we have to condone them. In fact, we condemn them,” Skorton said.

Blanked: A winless record was tough enough for one Michigan high school girls’ basketball team, but getting shut out in a game earlier this week was quite another.

“The whole bus ride home, I couldn’t believe it,” Leslie High Coach Jay Harkness told the Jackson Citizen Patriot after the team fell to 0-13 after a 61-0 loss to Olivet. “We missed layups. We missed two-footers. Everything that could go wrong did.”

At least the bus didn’t break down on the way home.

For what it’s worth: Only 14,362 fans watched the Mighty Ducks’ 2-0 victory Tuesday over the San Jose Sharks, the smallest home crowd in 10 years and the third-smallest crowd in history at the 17,496-seat HP Pavilion.

A few Bay Area reporters, evidently with little else to do during the game, counted heads in a futile attempt to confirm the accuracy of the attendance figure. They counted 72 of 285 seats filled in one section and 108 of 374 in another, then gave up.

Trivia answer: Whitey Ford of the Yankees with 10. Clemens, who has said he will retire at season’s end, wouldn’t crack a list of the top-10 winners in World Series history.

And finally: Tony Kornheiser of the Washington Post is concerned about the Redskins’ 3-4 record, and he’s even more troubled by the reaction of Redskin fans to the team’s recent poor play. Kornheiser wrote earlier this week, “If there was a ‘Homeland Security Redskins Terror Alert,’ we’d be at code orange, spiking up to red.”