With ‘The Simpsons,’ it helps to be a good sport

For a town without a major league sports franchise, the fictional home of “The Simpsons” sure does attract a lot of big-name athletes.

From former Lakers star Magic Johnson to Super Bowl-winning quarterback Tom Brady, more than three dozen sports figures have turned up over the last two decades in Springfield, the setting for the longest-running comedy in television history and now a blockbuster motion picture too.

In animated form, of course, a who’s who of athletic giants has rubbed elbows with Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie -- from former heavyweight boxing champion Joe Frazier and action-sports icon Tony Hawk to world champion figure skater Michelle Kwan and future baseball Hall of Fame member Roger Clemens.

“Generally, we say, ‘Who would we like to meet?’ ” says Al Jean, a sports fan and key creator on the show, “and then we write them into the script.”

Some decline the invitation -- Joe Montana, Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali come to mind, Jean says -- and others are barely worth the trouble. “Rhymes with Manseco,” Jean has said of one particularly troublesome guest.

But many have relished the pop-culture cachet of lending their voices to the award-winning Fox network juggernaut and global marketing phenomenon. Angels Manager Mike Scioscia, who was still a Dodgers catcher when his voice and likeness appeared in a 1992 episode, has called “The Simpsons” his favorite show and said last week his guest-starring role was an “amazing” experience.

Jean recalls a few of the show’s (usually) sporting guests:

Joe Frazier

“We wrote him into a script where he had a fight with Barney at the bar and Barney won. He said, ‘I’ll do the script, but I have to win.’ So we had him knock out Barney. He did not want to lose the boxing match to Barney Gumble. He was in [another episode] where he was a spokesman for a smoke-damaged outlet. He said, ‘You just wanted me because my name was Smokin’ Joe, right?’ ”

Joe Namath

“Just really cool, just what you would expect. For people who were kids when I was a kid, he was the hottest sports star at that time, so that was a big deal.”

Jose Canseco

“Canseco is the one guest star in the history of 400 guest stars that I didn’t enjoy directing. We went down to Anaheim because the Athletics were playing the Angels. We did two recordings of his line and he said, ‘OK, that’s enough.’ The other thing was, we had written a parody of ‘Bull Durham,’ where he was in a bathtub with Bart’s teacher, the way Susan Sarandon and [Kevin Costner] were in the tub in that movie. And he didn’t want to do it because his wife at the time was mad about him being depicted in a tub with another woman, even though it was a cartoon, so we had to completely rewrite it at the last minute.”

Mark McGwire

“He came to the lot and it was the year after he had set the record with 70 home runs. You could tell that there had been an enormous amount of publicity and he was a little, I think, dazed by it all. We have scripts that we ask people to sign, which he did, but then someone brought a huge bag of balls and he said, ‘If there are kids here, I’ll sign one ball per kid, but I’m not going to sign like a thousand balls for you to sell on EBay.’ I had never seen anybody so muscular and huge in my life. I mean, he was just enormous.”

Yao Ming

“I’ve seen Kareem in person, but Yao is even more startlingly large. Even when he was sitting down, I felt dwarfed, and I’m 6-2. English is not his first language, although considering how different Chinese is, I thought he did a good job. He just requested that we not make him look like a freak, which we wouldn’t.”

LeBron James

“That was exciting. It was right at the start of his career and he said something to us like, ‘You’ve got to do “The Simpsons.” I thought that was nice.”

Pete Sampras

“He was a nice guy and so pleasant that you forgot you were talking to maybe the best tennis player in the world. He was very easygoing and just seemed like a really normal, down-to-earth guy.”

Michelle Kwan

“She recorded with Warren Sapp -- they were in the room at the same time -- and they were a funny team. She was very sweet. She wanted to make sure in her part that she had some action, so we let her be like Zorro with her skates and say ‘beware the wrath of Kwan.’ She was very small, very petite. You could see how that would be the perfect body to give you aerodynamic lift and spin.”

Don Mattingly

“We had [Steve] Sax playing in a combo and Mattingly doing dishes, and Mattingly was mad about that. He was like, ‘Why can’t I be in a band?’ And we had a thing in the script where Mr. Burns kept telling Mattingly to get his hair cut even though his hair was shorter and shorter. And then a year later, [George] Steinbrenner actually did fine him for having hair that was too long, which was insane. It was a total coincidence.”

Darryl Strawberry

“We don’t take cheap shots. We don’t draw somebody fatter than they are. The one thing we did that I think was mean was when we had Darryl Strawberry on and we added to the script. When Bart and Lisa started chanting, “Darr-yl, Darr-yl,” we animated Strawberry with a tear in his eye. That wasn’t in the script that he read. It was sneaky and it wasn’t fair, but it was funny.”

jerome.crowe@latimes.com