Baseball Has Its Money Players, and Then There Are <i> These </i> Guys

Gene Collier, writing for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, has his version of baseball’s “All Overpaid Team.” A sampling:

John Smoltz, Braves--”Two wins in his first eight decisions at a very reasonable $3.15 million.”

Jack McDowell, White Sox--”Just what you’d expect from the highest-paid pitcher in the game ($5.3 million): Two wins, seven losses and a 6.24 ERA.

Add Collier: Ryne Sandberg, Cubs--”Hitting .238 in a season that projects to 13 homers on a salary of $6,299,966, or roughly $485,000 per homer.”

Sandberg must have read Collier’s critique. He retired Monday.

Trivia time: Who holds the career NBA finals record for most three-point baskets?

Nothing to it: After the San Diego Padres beat the San Francisco Giants on Sunday for a three-game series sweep, Tim Keown of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote:

“Nothing is happening with alarming frequency for the Giants. Not a little bit of nothing, or scattered periods of nothing. This is all nothing, all the time.”

Jerry Seinfeld would love this team.

Remembering Mo: Blackie Sherrod, in the Dallas Morning News: “Another memory of recently deceased columnist Mo Siegel was his column lead on Super Bowl XII, concerning the Denver quarterback who was a born-aginner:

“ ‘Craig Morton found God, but he couldn’t find Moses.’ Reference, of course, was to Haven Moses, Bronco receiver, who caught but one pass in the loss to the Cowboys.”

Harassed: Boxing promoter Don King, commenting to Ron Borges of the Boston Globe, on an impending federal indictment for insurance fraud:

“They have been working for years to get me indicted. They got the CIA, the FBI, the IRS, Interpol all on top of me without no foundation, so I know I’ll be indicted.

“That’s just a rubber stamp. They’ve spent 2 1/2 years and the taxpayers’ money, what they gonna do, say King is innocent?”

Come again? Golfer Fred Couples often contradicts himself in interviews. A sampling before the U.S. Open, which starts Thursday at Oakmont Country Club near Pittsburgh:

“Either my back will heal up and I’ll play, or it won’t and I won’t play. I won’t lose sleep at night over that. I could retire and do other things, live a happy life and I’d be miserable.”

Add Open: A report from Golf Digest: “Oakmont was a perfect fit for a city like Pittsburgh, which was once so unlovely H.L. Mencken wrote that its architecture consisted ‘solely of grotesqueries of ugliness that lacerate the eye.’ ”

Trivia answer: Michael Cooper of the Lakers, with 35.

Quotebook: Greg Anthony of the New York Knicks on the Houston Rockets’ use of the three-point shot: “They rely more on it as a weapon. With us, it’s more of a secret weapon, kind of like a knockout punch.”