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These Kids Didn’t Play Finders Keepers

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Times Staff Writer

What would you do if you found baseball playoff tickets in the street?

Two New Jersey seventh graders and another group of seven youngsters did the right thing, turning them in to the police earlier this week.

A package of 70 New York Yankee playoff tickets belonging to a bank in Summit, N.J., apparently fell off a delivery truck, Associated Press reported.

Corey Platt and Chris Osmun found some of them while walking home from school, and they flagged down an officer. The other group found the majority of tickets down the street, took them home, told their parents and turned them in, a police spokesman said.

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Only four of the 70 tickets were unaccounted for.

The Yankees gave the kids and their parents tickets to Thursday night’s 6-4 victory over Minnesota. The team also sent them memorabilia, and the bank invited the boys and their parents to a New Jersey Net game in December.

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Trivia time: What Southern California college football team went undefeated and unscored-upon and defeated teams from USC and UCLA in 1944? This is a trick question.

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Very crafty: Coach Tom Craft, who has resurrected San Diego State football in three years, spoke at the Pasadena Quarterbacks Club luncheon Friday and was asked why he was able to recruit so well.

“We’ve got a good car dealer,” he joked. “We give out cars.”

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Geographical differences: Fresno State plays at Louisiana Tech in a Western Athletic Conference game today. Louisiana Tech in the WAC?

“Like I always say, you want the real taste of the old West, there’s no place like Louisiana,” Jim Armstrong wrote in his AOL.com column.

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Grand dandies: Following up a recent item about the 11 players who have hit two grand slams in one game: Jim Gentile of the Baltimore Orioles hit two in consecutive innings against the Minnesota Twins’ Pedro Ramos and Paul Giel in 1961.

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Topping that was Fernando Tatis of the St. Louis Cardinals, who hit grand slams off the Dodgers’ Chan Ho Park in a single inning in 1999. The Cardinals scored 11 runs in the inning.

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Interesting question: Reader Janice Hough asks, “Will the Dodgers vote the Colorado Rockies’ bullpen a full or half playoff share?”

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Looking back: On this day in 1950, Jim Hardy threw six touchdown passes, five to Bob Shaw, to lead the Chicago Cardinals over the Baltimore Colts, 55-13.

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Trivia answer: Caltech, which went 4-0 and defeated the USC junior varsity, 20-0, and the UCLA JV, 33-0. The wartime team was primarily made up of players from Stanford who were at Caltech as part of a Navy training program.

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And finally: Gary Sheffield’s David Letterman top 10 list on Yankee strategies for winning the World Series included this one: “Thanks to some scientist friends of mine over at Caltech, Mickey Mantle will be playing center field.”

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Larry Stewart can be reached at larry.stewart@latimes.com.

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