Morning Briefing

Baseball’s ghosts plan curtain call

The ghost players who for 18 years have walked out of the cornfields and entertained tourists at the “Field of Dreams” movie site in Dyersville, Iowa, will perform for the last time on Sept. 30.

“It’s just kind of an end of an era,” Keith Rahe, who is in charge of the ghost players, told the Des Moines Register. “We’ve been doing this a long time.”

The players would emerge from the cornfields dressed in 1919 Chicago White Sox uniforms, just as they did in the 1989 movie starring Kevin Costner.

And they played games, often inviting those in attendance to join in.

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Trivia time

In “Field of Dreams,” the lead characters attend a game at Fenway Park, where the name of a baseball player appears on the scoreboard. It was an actual former major leaguer who played one game but never got an at-bat. What was his name?

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Boxed in

As football players, John Lynch, Hamza Abdullah and Quincy Morgan are no strangers to hitting. But not quite this way.

All three took up boxing during the off-season as a supplement to their training programs.

“You get more out of that than running 100s and ‘gases’ because you’re constantly swinging and you’re not only swinging but you’re staying low, you’re dodging, you’re moving around the ring and then you’re punching,” Morgan told the Associated Press. “I came back in good shape.”

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Capping sales

New Era Cap has pulled from store shelves a lineup of team logo baseball caps denounced by baseball officials as tailor-made for gang members.

The three styles in question used colors and symbols linked to three gangs: Crips, Bloods and Latin Kings.

“It has been brought to our attention that some combinations of icons and colors on a select number of our caps could be too closely perceived to be in association with gangs,” said Christopher H. Koch, chief executive of New Era.

“In response, we, along with Major League Baseball, have pulled those caps.”

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Cash canine

Trading card collector Rochelle Steffen of Cape Girardeau, Mo., was so upset with Michael Vick over the disgraced NFL star’s dogfighting tribulations that she put her entire Vick card collection on EBay.

Only she put the cards in her dog’s mouth first.

The dog chewed, crumpled, tore and slobbered on the cards, rendering them, you would think, worthless.

But they are, by far, the most valuable Vick cards on EBay, with the highest bid for the 22 cards reaching $1,000 as of Friday afternoon. The next highest-priced Vick card on EBay is a mint-condition rookie card selling for $169.99.

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Criminal behavior

Rick Morrissey of the Chicago Tribune, looking at the Vick case from a different angle, wondered why the public outrage seems to be more widespread than it was against Rae Carruth, Adam “Pacman” Jones, Lawrence Phillips and others who have transgressed against humans.

“Abuse your dog, and people howl. Smack around your girlfriend or face charges of sexually assaulting a woman and people shake their heads and roll their eyes,” Morrissey wrote. “And they’ll eventually cheer you again. If you don’t believe that, pay attention the next time Kobe Bryant rolls through town.”

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Trivia answer

Archibald “Moonlight” Graham. He played one game for the New York Giants in 1905 then quit five days later and, as he did in the movie, became a doctor.

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And finally

So far so good for Team USA basketball, which has outscored opponents, 348-191, in its first three games at the FIBA Americas championship in Las Vegas. But Jim Litke of the Associated Press says that needs to spill over into the Olympics next summer.

“Just this once,” he wrote, “the NBA is hoping that what happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas.”

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peter.yoon@latimes.com