All the fuss about Detroit pitcher Kenny Rogers and the foreign substance on his pitching hand (and its possible influence on the elusive flight of his deliveries) is bound to find a place in World Series history. Such controversies always do when they occur on baseball's biggest stage. "Smudge-gate," or whatever you care to call it, found Rogers claiming the substance on his palm was simply dirt, while others, including St. Louis Manager Tony La Russa, arched their eyebrows over that explanation.

Rogers appeared to wash off whatever it was after the umpire spoke to him about it early in Game 2, in which he got the win. There was no inspection performed, however, and on at least one sports talk show I heard it suggested that Rogers easily could have gone on to hide a strategic substance somewhere else thereafter – under his cap or belt, for instance.

Many such skeptics figure if there's a will, there's a way, yet there is a very simple means of discreetly monitoring such possible cheating during the course of the game without conducting a full-body pat-down. Can't the home plate umpire periodically just ask to do a quick visual inspection of the ball after it's pitched? Surely, any evidence should be apparent only seconds after it arrives in the catcher's mitt.

• Carlisle, Pa., where Jim Thorpe once played a handful of sports at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, is now on the sports map a century later as the home of Dickinson College. Men's Fitness magazine recently named Dickinson, a liberal arts college of 2,300 students in south-central Pennsylvania, as the nation's fittest campus. Dickinson was cited for its physical education requirement and range of nutrition and exercise choices, not for its powerful sports teams. Rounding out the Top 10, in order, are Colgate, Boston College, Wheaton College (Ill.), the University of Vermont, Gustavus Adolphus College (Minn.), Grove City College (Pa.), Texas Christian University, Baylor, and the University of Richmond (Va.)

• Give Clemson football fans credit for using $2 bills as novel calling cards. Ever since the 1977 Peach Bowl in Atlanta, wherever Clemson fans travel, they use $2 bills (often stamped with an orange Clemson tiger paw) to pay local merchants. Doing so sends a message about the group's economic impact and makes bowl game organizers take notice when it comes time to choose which teams to invite to their games.

• It's a sorry state of affairs when liability concerns lead elementary schools to ban playing tag on the playground, as has happened at schools in Attleboro, Mass.; Cheyenne, Wyo.; and Spokane, Wash. Attleboro, in fact, has eliminated all unsupervised chase games because of the potential for collisions. Maybe everybody should just stay inside at recess.

• Seldom in pro sports does one person serve as a general manager twice for the same team. Actually, the only person I know of who has done it is hockey's Bob Clarke, who recently submitted his resignation to the Philadelphia Flyers, a franchise he's been synonymous with for nearly 36 years. Although not all those years were spent with the Flyers, he forever will be thought of as the team's original superstar for when he led a previously lackluster expansion team to Stanley Cup glory. The Flin Flon, Manitoba, native, once better known as "Bobby," captained the powerful Broad Street Bullies to NHL championships in 1974 and 1975 and was the league's MVP in '73, '75, and '76. He enjoyed success as the team's general manager during his first tour, between 1984 and '90, when the Flyers twice reached the Cup finals, although he was eventually dismissed in 1990 when a rift developed between him and the team's president. The second tour began in 1994 and lasted up until this month, when the team got off to its worst start in 17 years (1-6-1) and Clarke cited burnout and flagging desire as his reasons for stepping down. The Flyers, however, plan to keep him on in some undetermined front-office capacity.  That seems a wise move for the living symbol the club's golden era.

• Good quarterbacks, I'm convinced, must be good multi-taskers. Certainly one of the best in the current era is Indianapolis's Peyton Manning, who thrives as a one-man, on-field central command post. The way he runs the Colts' offense, often moving around right before the snap of the ball to call plays, signals that he's a multiprocessor.

• The state-of-the art field lights being used at Busch Stadium and Comerica Park during this year's World Series are called toothbrush lights, an apt description for the shape of the light towers. And speaking of lights, did you know that the NFL's New England Patriots have an official partnership with Granite City Electric Supply Company of Quincy, Mass.? The Patriots call Granite City their "official distributor of electrical supplies." I assume this means they get a good price on replacement light bulbs.

• As any longtime Dallas Cowboys watcher would know, wide receiver Terrell Owens is hardly the first guy to stir up the franchise's waters. Remember Duane Thomas and Thomas "Hollywood" Henderson? Thomas was the player who called Coach Tom Landry a "plastic man" during the early 1970s, when he briefly was the team's top rusher. He eventually decided to clam up, refusing to talk to the media for months. Henderson, an outside linebacker, loved the spotlight, as his nickname implies, and was quick to make inflammatory remarks. Both players, it eventually came out, faced drug problems that eventually forced them out of football. Henderson, however, turned his life around and now gives motivational talks with an antidrug message.

• The Detroit Tigers practiced a little one-upsmanship by building the biggest scoreboard in baseball, a 10-story behemoth that is just a tad larger than the one at Cleveland's Jacob's Field.

• Until I heard an NFL draft wonk explain the value of left tackles, I never really thought much about why teams consider them as such offensive building blocks. The explanation is that they are the players most responsible for protecting righthanded quarterbacks from blind-side pass rushers. Without a good left tackle, a quarterback is bound to be jittery in the pocket. Some draftwatchers may have noticed that when the New York Jets made D'Brickashaw Ferguson, a left tackle out of the University of Virginia, the fourth overall selection in last spring's NFL draft, their selection was cheered by oft-critical fans. They apparently knew what Ferguson's presence in the trenches could mean for the Jets, who presumably paid him the going rate. According to a story in The New York Times Magazine, left tackles were the second-highest paid players in the NFL in 2004, averaging $5.5 million a year, a sum second only to quarterbacks. In case you're wondering, the 6 ft. 6 in., 300-lb. Ferguson's first name was inspired by a character in "The Thorn Birds," a bestselling 1977 novel that was made into a television miniseries.

• Modern stadium architects have learned the lesson that creating a sense of place by connecting with the surroundings is important. The two venues for this year's World Series - Detroit's Comerica Park and St. Louis's new Busch Stadium – are perfect examples of "getting it." Both were designed to create panoramic views of the city beyond the outfield wall. The Detroit and St. Louis skylines, in a sense, are almost extensions of the stadium.

Even ballparks that are largely enclosed often utilize a "notch" concept, in which a gap is created in the grandstand that allows a glimpse to what lies outside. And old parks, too, sometimes find that their irregularities offer "windows"  on their wonderful urban character. This struck me on my first visit to Yankee Stadium, when I noticed that from my seat on the third base line that I could see trains passing through a gap between the right-field grandstand and bleachers. It was a pure slice of New York that brought more of the city inside the turnstiles.

• Overcommercialization in college sports may not always be easy to define, but you know it when you see it. That, at least, is how I felt recently during a televised game (wish I could remember which one) when a net was raised behind the goalposts that featured "Allstate" in huge letters and the insurance company's cupped-hands logo. Not only was it impossible to miss such  in-your-face-marketing, but it intruded on a traditional football scene, namely the ball sailing through the uprights against a backdrop of fans or seats, or some combination of the two. This was blatant commercialism, even if for good causes. When the net-branding started last year with 39 Division I-A teams, Allstate donated $300 per field goal and $100 per extra point to the universities and to hurricane relief.

• I never thought I'd see the day when a Louisville-vs.-West Virginia football game would be considered nationally important. This year's Nov. 2 showdown will be big since both teams are undefeated and high ranked, West Virginia No. 4 in the latest Associated Press coaches' poll and Louisville No. 6.   

• Something tells me that Carlos Beltran of the New York Mets will continue to see that wicked curveball that ended the National League Championship Series all winter long. The delivery by St. Louis rookie reliever Adam Wainwright so froze Beltran that he watched the third strike with the bases loaded and the Mets trailing 3-1 in the bottom of the ninth. Some Mets fans may find it hard to forgive Beltran for being called out instead of swinging, but others give Wainwright credit for making a tremendous pitch that broke off the table and into the strike zone.

• I can't say I'm surprised to learn that the TV coverage of the World Series is off to a sluggish start, ratings-wise. With prime-time postseason play practically a nightly event in October, it's conceivable that by the time the World Series starts, casual fans want a small breather and opt to tune in mid-Series. And speaking of audience interest, if World Series games were still played on weekday afternoons, as they once were, do you think today's schoolchildren would try to keep abreast of games in progress the way they once did? Somehow I doubt it.

• In baseball parlance, left-fielder Endy Chavez's brilliant over-the-fence catch in the seventh game of the Mets-Cardinals playoff series was a true "snow cone" – a grab in which the ball ends up sticking out of the glove webbing. It was just too bad for the Mets that robbing Scott Rolen of a two-run homer didn't serve to ignite the New York offense. 

• Tim McCarver, the Fox baseball analyst who is calling a record 17th World Series, was the St. Louis catcher when the Cardinals and Tigers last squared off in late October in 1968. Before working for Fox, McCarver was also a lead analyst for NBC, CBS, and ABC. Oh, by the way, in that '68 World Series, St. Louis lost after leading 3 games to 1. McCarver, however, did his part by batting .333 and catching in all seven games.

• Here's guessing that Detroit's Placido Polanco may be the first player in World Series history to wear a hood under his batting helmet because of the cold temperatures (44 degrees at the start of Game 2).

• The two Koreas enjoyed a thaw in their testy relations in 2000 and 2004, when they marched together in the Olympic opening ceremonies. But if tensions remain high over North Korea's nuclear weapons testing, it's hard to imagine that North and South Korea will field a unified Olympic team for the first time at Beijing in 2008, as they've agreed in principle to do.

• Some of those Detroit fans have done a masterful job of applying face paints to make themselves look like tigers. At times, you'd think they were holding a casting call for "Cats" extras at Comerica Park.

• Looking for a true sports hero? Baseball just bid adieu to one at a public memorial service in Kansas City, Mo., for Buck O'Neil, a former player-manager who became the unofficial spokesman for the Negro Leagues.  O'Neil was such a classy guy that he didn't even complain when the Baseball Hall of Fame inexplicably left him out of a last-call induction for Negro League stars this summer. Without a hint of bitterness, he actually spoke at the group's induction in Cooperstown, N.Y. At the memorial service, one of O'Neil's nieces summarized his pure-gold personal philosophy as "give without remembering and take without forgetting."

• Detroit's Comerica Park surely is the only major-league ballpark with its own ferris wheel (with cars in the shape of baseballs) and a merry-go-round. Makes me think the designer might have been influenced by the Brooklyn Cyclones, who play their games right alongside the Coney Island amusement park. The famous Parachute Jump towers over the stadium.

Have you noticed who's sitting on top of the women's professional golf world? It's not Annika Sorenstam, a rejuvenated Karrie Webb, or Michelle Wie. No, it's the pride of Mexico, Lorena Ochoa, the youngest recipient and only golfer to ever receive Mexico's highest athletic accolade, the National Sports Award.

After winning the Samsung World Championship, her tour-leading fifth title this year, Ochoa appears to be a lock to end Sorenstam's five-year reign as the LPGA's top player. Interestingly enough, both Ochoa and Sorenstam played collegiately at the University of Arizona, where Lorena was known to put in a 10K run even before golf team conditioning began at 6:30 a.m.

Ochoa, a third-year pro, is a versatile athlete who has competed in triathlons, half-marathons, and even something called an ecothon, where entrants vie in mountain biking, trekking, swimming, kayaking, and rappelling.

What makes her story appealing is that it breaks the mold. Not only is she just the second Mexican to earn a spot on the LPGA tour, she represents a small golfing minority of just 18,000 players in a country of over 100 million people. Her success has opened the eyes of many girls and young women in a culture that traditionally hasn't encouraged their pursuit of sports.

• One of my favorite features in the "ESPN College Football Encyclopedia" is a section that shows how the helmet at each major college has changed during the past 50 years. Some of the traditional powers, such as Penn State and Nebraska, have changed the design of their helmets hardly at all. Notre Dame has pretty much stuck with its solid gold helmets, but to my surprise I learned that from 1959 to 1962 they were adorned with a green shamrock, while in 1963 they bore each player's number. In fact, at about that time, numerals on helmets were very "in." Now, they've pretty much disappeared. Why? I'm guessing there are two main reasons: The numbers were never that visible from the stands, and maybe more important, teams like to use logos that brand their teams and help sell licensed merchandise.

• Since Fenway Park is still standing, I might want to know a little more about the website that is selling wooden pens made from Fenway seats before buying one of the pens for $220, plus shipping and handling.

•Even if Joe Gibbs doesn't take the Washington Redskins to another NFL championship, he's already the only NFL coach to win three Super Bowls with three different quarterbacks: Joe Theismann, Doug Williams, and Mark Rypien. None of the QBs are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

•To be a college or pro football referee these days means you've got to be good at making announcements. It must be a daunting task to stand on the field, before a full stadium and possibly millions of TV viewers, and make penalty calls while providing succinct explanations of various rulings.

• I keep thinking that one of these days I'll wake up and find that Major League Soccer is more than an afterthought on American sports pages.

• Watching the long-suffering Arizona Cardinals lose to the undefeated Chicago Bears when it appeared to be Arizona's night was agonizing. The Cardinals were playing  in front of a national Monday Night Football audience, had a capacity crowd in a spectacular new stadium, and held a 20-0 halftime lead. A win clearly had the potential to be a turning point for the franchise. What was particularly hard to swallow is that the Cardinals held the Bears without an offensive touchdown and still lost, 24-23, after Chicago roared back with a field goal, two fumble-recovery runbacks, and a game-winning 83-yard punt return for a touchdown. Arizona still could have won, but their ever-dependable placekicker Neil Rackers missed a very makeable 40-yard attempt in the last minute. The collapse so frustrated Cardinals coach Dennis Green that he fired the team's offensive coordinator, Keith Rowen, after the game. After such a morale-deflating loss, Arizona must quickly regroup and find a way to beat the league's only winless team, the Oakland Raiders, six days after losing to maybe the NFL's best team.

• Perhaps Buzz Bissinger is nocturnal. He has authored two books about sports played at night. The more famous of the two is the bestseller "Friday Night Lights," the story of Texas high school football that is the basis of a new critically acclaimed TV series. The lesser known is "3 Nights in August." The latter is an in-depth look "inside the mind" of St. Louis Cardinals Manager Tony La Russa. Although books of this kind can be a little too "inside baseball," in one nugget La Russa describes Charlie Lau as the person who "singlehandedly influenced the game of baseball more than any other individual in the past quarter century." That, indeed, is high praise. Lau, who died in 1984, was a batting coach with the Yankees, Kansas City Royals, Baltimore Orioles, Oakland A's, and Chicago White Sox. Lau identified certain principles that have been adopted even by current players who never knew him. Among other points, he emphasized swinging from the top to bottom with no uppercut, and also making a complete follow-through, in which the top hand comes off the bat at the end of the swinging arc. Look for this the next time you watch a televised game. Among the players to adopt this technique is St. Louis slugger Albert Pujols.

• Sometimes I wonder if Muhammad Ali ushered in the era of trash talking in sports, and if he did, if he ever wishes he could end it.

•Is there any doubt that Lee Corso is the football version of Dick Vitale, the fast-talking, high-energy basketball analyst. It's been so long now since Corso last coached or played the game, a little review may be in order. He and actor Burt Reynolds were teammates and roommates at Florida State University in the 1950s. As a head coach, Corso sandwiched stints at Louisville and Northern Illinois around 10 years at Indiana University, where he led the Hoosiers to their first bowl victory in 75 years (a 38-37 win in the 1979 Holiday Bowl).

• Is there a NFL defensive player who competes with greater heart or is more fun to watch than undersized Miami Dolphins linebacker Zach Thomas? If so, I haven't seen him.

• Sorting through my mail at home the other day, I came upon a piece that appeared to be from the Women's National Basketball Association. It turned out to be a credit card application from  Discover Card. The connections to the league were hardly major incentives to sign up: a special edition WNBA card, access to Discover Card WNBA fan lounge events (after-game parties for schmoozing with players), and eligibility for exclusive offers at WNBA.com. The timing of the mailing seemed a little odd, given that the league's 10th anniversary season ended Sept. 9.

• Here's a novel seasonal promotion from the Detroit Shock, the champions of the WNBA: downloadable stencils for use in carving the facial images of several players and Coach Bill Laimbeer into pumpkins. Fans are encouraged to send in pictures of their  Halloween jack-o-lanterns for posting on the Shock website.

• It's a little early to call it a trend, but last Saturday I noticed that the wives of two college football coaches, Texas A&M's Dennis Franchione and Indiana's Terry Hoeppner, charged onto the field to hug their husbands after upset victories (A&M over undefeated Missouri and Indiana over 15th-ranked Iowa). It was heartwarming stuff.

• The bench-clearing, intracity football brawl between the University of Miami and Florida International University, it seems, was fueled by tensions between the players good enough to be recruited by Miami and those who didn't make the grade. Angry words reportedly were exchanged even before the opening kickoff, and the hard feelings were hardly assuaged after FIU was routed, 35-0.

Initially, one-game suspensions were announced for 31 players, including 18 for FIU. That was awfully lenient, however, so meatier punishments, ranging from indefinite suspensions and outright dismissals to community service and completion of anger-management training, soon followed, mostly for Florida International.

With all the video evidence available, there really was no way of avoiding more serious sentences for the worst offenders in the melee. Still, Miami is mostly sticking to one-game detentions, with a vow to have zero tolerance in the future – that is, fight and you're gone. For now, though, university president Donna Shalala has said the 'Canes "will not throw any student under the bus for instant restoration of our image or our reputation." It should be noted, however, that Miami's reputation even before the brawl has not always been stellar. After last season's Peach Bowl, for instance, the Hurricanes fought with LSU players.

In Miami's case, the schedule couldn't be kinder. The Hurricanes (4-2) should be able to beat winless Duke even without 13 suspended players. Florida International, meanwhile, might as well mail in another "L" when they next play, a game against Alabama on Oct 28. FIU is 0-7 and now has indefinitely suspended or dismissed all 18 participants in the brawl.

The decision that both schools now must face is whether to play each other again next year. If they don't, it might signal that the two warring parties can't be trusted to bury the hatchet. The University of Miami trustees apparently have already concluded that the series certainly won't continue past 2007.

The one voice that seems glaringly absent in all this is the National Collegiate Athletic Association's. Where is the leadership of this reputedly reform-minded organization at this time? If it can legislate detailed regulations about the dos and don'ts of recruiting, shouldn't it at least rail against gridiron street fighting?

• I'm not a fan of those televised NFL shows set up inside the stadium to evoke a "we are there" feeling. The ex-player analysts practically yell to be heard over the crowd as they share their sound bites. It seems all style and very little substance.

• Of all ESPN's numerous college football telecasting teams, my favorite is the Friday night crew of play-by-play man Dave Pasch and analysts Rod Gilmore and Trevor Matich. They play well off one another, bring fresh insights to bear, and make less-glamorous games interesting. Both analysts played collegiately, Gilmore as a defensive back at Stanford and Matich as an offensive lineman at Brigham Young, and both enjoy more than a passing interest in literature. Gilmore, now an attorney with a business law firm, was an English major as an undergraduate. Matich loves to read and occasionally write, and says on his website that "Lord of the Rings" is his all-time favorite book.

• Scott Spiezio's mini red goatee is one of the strangest baseball hairstyles ever, but at least there's a connection with his team, the St. Louis Cardinals (or Redbirds). Fans find it easy to copy the red-dyed strip of hair growing under his lower lip with their own stick-on "soul patches."

• Discovered recently: Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Lynn Swann, the former Steeler wide receiver, once had a part in the movie, "The Last Boy Scout."  It's not a role the Republican candidate has bragged about on the campaign trail.

• That old English "D" on the uniforms of the Detroit Tigers is absolutely classic, every bit as good, if not better, than the Yankees' gothic "NY."  In doing a little research on the subject, I found the "D" dates back to 1904 as Detroit's primary logo. To trace its evolution and that of other sports team insignias, I highly recommend a visit to Chris Creamer's sportslogo.net website.

• If you were going to outline the perfect resume for Ohio State's head football coach, then the man who currently holds the job, Jim Tressel, already owns it. He is an Ohioan through and through whose career has taken him outside his home state just once, and then only for two years as an assistant at Syracuse. Otherwise, Tresell played high school and college ball in Berea, Ohio, near Cleveland, where he quarterbacked Baldwin Wallace College for his father, a local coaching legend. After that he built his credentials as an assistant at the University of Akron, Miami of Ohio, Syracuse, and Ohio State. From there he became the head coach at Youngstown State in Youngstown, Ohio, where his teams won three national Division I-AA championships. To top things off, as a boy Tressel shagged footballs for Lou "The Toe" Groza, the Hall of Fame placekicker for the Cleveland Browns.

• It's hard to believe that the Detroit Tigers were a sub .500 team only a year ago, winning just 71 of 162 games.

• It's been 16 years since Penn State was accepted into the Big Ten Conference, and I still can't get used to the idea. To me, the Big Ten (which kept its name while adding an 11th team) is a Midwest league, and a school that sits in the middle of Pennsylvania isn't a logical geographical fit. The conference, however, is happy to have Penn State, especially during the football season, when the Nittany Lions can be counted on to fill 107,282-seat Beaver Stadium. A colleague of mine who is a Penn State alum and an avid follower of its athletic program informs me, from what he's read, that so many people migrate to the campus for home games that State College, Pa., becomes the third-largest city in the state during those games, behind Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

• Instant replay has come to gymnastics, a sport where judging decisions are often questioned. Replay challenges were introduced this week at the world championships in Denmark. The penalty for requesting an unnecessary replay (one which doesn't lead to a different score) is not a loss of a timeout, as occurs football, but a monetary fine: $300 for the first unsuccessful challenge and $500 for the next.

• A friend whose son works part-time for the Boston Red Sox told me this story. To thank members of the off-field staff after the season, team president and CEO Larry Lucchino had the batting cage rolled into position at Fenway Park so each employee could take some swings against a pitching machine. Imagine what a thrill it must have been for my friend's son to blast a ball to deepest centerfield that probably would have cleared the Green Monster in left if he'd only pulled it. The hit raised more than a few eyebrows, coming as it did against relatively slow 70 m.p.h. deliveries that don't lend themselves to long balls. The young man had played college ball at a small school in New Hampshire, but no one would guess from looking at him that he might have David Ortiz-like power.

• A nice sports companion to have around at this time of year is Avalon's "Baseball Field Guide: An In-Depth Illustrated Guide to the Complete Rules of Baseball."  It's the best thing I've found so far for making sense of the rules in clear, concise language and easy-to-follow drawings. Here are a couple of things I've learned from the book: In running to first base, a batter must run outside the foul line once he reaches the halfway point; and, if the head of the bat crosses the foul line, it is considered a swing.

• OK, Red Sox fans, if you think it was bad that the team let Babe Ruth and Roger Clemens get away, you won't like hearing that they once passed up an opportunity to claim Albert Pujols, the St. Louis Cardinals slugger. Gordon Edes of The Boston Globe revealed recently that the Red Sox came "within minutes" of drafting him in 1999, but instead selected Massachusetts native Rick Asadoorian, a name that quickly disappeared into the ether.

One of the greatest moments in Los Angeles Dodgers history won't be entirely forgotten, but the team missed an opportunity to burn it into the game's collective lore by quickly bowing out of the playoffs.  As it is, the events of Sept. 19 will be an interesting footnote in a "might have been" season in which the team fell short of making their first trip to the World Series since 1988, when they beat the Oakland A's.

On Sept. 19, LA beat National League West rival San Diego, 11-10, in one of the club's most exciting games ever – an 11-inning victory in which four consecutive Dodgers homered in the bottom of the ninth to tie the game, and Nomar Garciaparra hit a walk-off, solo home run in the 11th for the win. No team ever wants to waste such an effort, especially when only four teams have ever hit four consecutive homers in a game, and none in a more dramatic context than the Dodgers.

The Dodgers and Padres actually ended the regular season in a tie, but the Padres earned the National League West title by virtue of a better head-to-head record, while the Dodgers landed a wild-card berth.

While that home run barrage was certainly the season highlight for the Dodgers, the image that will stand out from the postseason was a rarely seen baserunning blooper. In an attempt to score on a ball hit to the outfield, Jeff Kent and J.D. Drew arrived at home plate almost simultaneously, allowing New York Mets catcher Paul Lo Duca to tag out both runners in bang-bang fashion. That snuffed out what might have been a second-inning rally, and the Dodgers never recovered thereafter, getting swept in three games.

Veteran sportscaster Vin Scully, whose tenure doing Dodger broadcasts dates to 1950, said the play turned back the clock to the club's "daffy days," in Brooklyn, when fans called them the Bums before the team's 1950s golden era.

The Dodgers finally hit the heights in 1955, with the team's first championship, before moving to LA, where it has won five World Series, in 1959, 1963, 1965, 1981, and 1988. Its overall winning percentage during 18 Series appearances, however, is only .333.

Ronan Tynan: baseball's all-star vocalist

Say what you will about the Yankees embarrassing exit from the playoffs, but they've still got the best singer in baseball. Irish tenor Ronan Tynan, who's a champion Paralympian when not hitting those high notes, has become something of a fixture with his a cappella rendition of "God Bless America"  during the seventh-inning stretch at Yankee Stadium.

It's quite a moving experience, even for TV watchers, to see Tynan standing ramrod straight, all alone on the field before a packed house, performing a beautifully unstylized rendition of this patriotic song. The New York Post says he talked his way into making his first singing appearance at the ballpark in 2000, this back when he knew little about the game. Since then, and especially since 9/11, he's become a die-hard Yankee fan and a regular presence at the ballpark.

Minors enjoy big-league baseball allure

The popularity of minor-league baseball continues to be one of the greatest success stories of the modern sports era. For the third year in a row, the minors set an attendance record with 41,710,357 fans. Many baseball people thought a long-held record from 1949, when there were more than twice as many teams (448 compared to 176 today that are affiliated with the Minor League Baseball organization), might never be broken.

Back then, teams benefitted from the existence of far fewer entertainment options (including televised games) and a population eager to enjoy family outings after World War II. Now, minor-league clubs are beneficiaries of a whole generation of college-educated marketing types.

For the seventh straight year, the Triple-A Sacramento RiverCats of the Pacific Coast League led all US Minor League Baseball clubs with an average attendance of 10,256.  Not far behind were the Memphis Redbirds and the Round Rock (Texas) Express, who play in suburban Austin. Another Texas team, the Frisco RoughRiders, were the biggest draw at the Double-A level, with 8,412 per game, while the Dayton (Ohio) Dragons were tops in Single-A with an even higher average attendance of 8,447.

Touching other bases

• Who would have imagined that the defending Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers would begin their season 1-3, or that their only victory would come not with Super Bowl MVP Ben Roethlisberger at quarterback but his backup Charlie Batch?

• In which sport, would you guess, is "the 18th tower" a coveted position? I was caught off guard by this myself when I came upon the description in a golf story about Englishman Nick Faldo taking over for CBS's lead analyst Lanny Wadkins on the all-important 18th-hole broadcasting tower.

• That a film company is using Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots, to shoot scenes for "The Game Plan," a Hollywood football movie, isn't odd. What is surprising is that the Patriots are letting Walt Disney Pictures film during the football season, even if it is during a stretch of road games. The Patriots have one of the most worn fields in the NFL. Oh, by the way, the comedy's premise – a promiscuous single NFL quarterback discovers that he has a 7-year-old daughter from a previous relationship – hardly seems the kind of storyline the NFL would embrace.

• A recent newswire photo taken at a professional baseball game in Kobe, Japan, showed a monkey, in uniform, delivering balls in a basket to the home-plate umpire. While eye-catching, the gimmick wasn't entirely novel. It brought back memories of Charlie Finley, when the former owner of the Oakland A's had Harvey, a mechanical Bugs Bunny-type rabbit holding a basket of fresh baseballs, pop out of the ground behind home plate. Finley introduced a lot of other ideas to the game in the early 1970s, including colorful uniforms that broke the white/gray mold.

• The recent passing of golf great Patty Berg brought forth a number of interesting details about her life, including that she was elected the first president of the LPGA in 1950. My favorite tidbit, though, was about her connection to another sport: football. Growing up in Minneapolis, she played on a neighborhood football team alongside Bud Wilkinson, who went on to become one of college football's legendary coaches at the University of Oklahoma. The kicker is: Berg played quarterback, Wilkinson in the line.

• The reelection campaign of Sen. George Allen (R) of Virginia ran into some unexpected turbulence recently when a University of Virginia football teammate of 30 years ago said Allen frequently used racially charged language. Allen denies the accusation. Still, it seems odd that Ken Shelton, a tight end, would stir up a controversy about the team's quarterback, but, then, maybe Allen wasn't throwing to him enough.

If you haven't yet affixed one of the new baseball postage stamps to a letter or – perish the thought – bill payment, I encourage a trip to your local post office or the USPS's online service during the postseason. The "Baseball Sluggers" collection is a set of four beautifully designed stamps made to resemble old-fashioned baseball trading cards. Larger versions of these same images come on postcards, which even more closely resemble the old cards because of roughly similar dimensions.

It's an idiosyncratic set in the sense that it pulls together four sluggers whose main connection - other than home runs - seems to be that they weren't included in a 20-player set of "Legends" stamps issued in 2000. Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, and Negro Leagues star Josh Gibson were power hitters saluted in that set.  The departed cleanup hitters honored this time around are Mickey Mantle, Hank Greenberg, Mel Ott, and Roy Campanella.

Mantle, it's safe to say, is the best known, not only because he played for the Yankees, but because he was alive most recently, having died in 1995, and also hit the most home runs of the foursome (536).  Ott had 511, Greenberg 331, and Campanella, whose career was cut short by a car accident, hit 242 during eight seasons.

Ott played for the New York Giants beginning in the 1920s and finished his career in the '40s as the team's player-manager. He's often best remembered for his unusual batting style, in which he lifted his front leg, a trademark that found a flamingo-like variation in the style adopted by Japanese slugger Sadaharu Oh, whose 868 career home runs in Japan's professional league are 113 more than Hank Aaron's Major League Baseball record.

Mantle is the switch-hitter in the bunch, actually the only switch-hitter with 500 or more homers. Although he considered himself a better right-handed hitter (which is how he's shown batting on the 39-cent stamp), the Commerce Comet hit more homers from the left side, perhaps because he was able to take advantage of Yankee Stadium's short right-field porch.

To be honored with a stamp, a person has to be gone for at least 10 years (US presidents being the only exception). In Mantle's case, his eligibility roughly coincided with the 50th anniversary of the 1956 baseball season, which many believe was his greatest. That year he won the Triple Crown by leading the American League in the Big Three batting statistics: home runs (52), runs batted in (130), and batting average (.353).

Marvin Diemer, a former Iowa state legislator, saw this as an ideal opportunity to refocus attention on Mantle. So six years ago, he began a petition drive for a Mantle stamp, which received a number of VIP endorsements, including that of Yankee fan and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Diemer became acquainted with Mantle and former Yankee pitcher Whitey Ford when he attended their fantasy baseball camp in Florida in 1992.

Roy Campanella, whose father was of Italian descent and his mother an African-American, was baseball's first black catcher and a teammate of Jackie Robinson's on the Brooklyn Dodgers. He was the ultimate package for a player at his position: a masterful handler of pitchers, a superb backstop with a rifle arm, and an excellent hitter. In 1953, he set a single-season record for catchers with 40 home runs, and won the second of his three National League MVP awards.

Following the 1957 season, the Dodgers' last in Brooklyn, Campy was involved in an auto accident.  Largely immobilized, he never played in Los Angeles but served as a team community relations ambassador. Before the 1959 season, the Yankees agreed to travel to L.A. to play the Dodgers in a special tribute exhibition game for Campanella. The game, held in the Coliseum, attracted 93,000 to Roy Campanella Night, which is still the largest crowd to ever witness a major-league game.

Hank Greenberg's baseball biography is as interesting as anyone who's ever played the game. A native of Bronx, N.Y., he turned down an offer from the Yankees in 1930 to stay at home and back up Lou Gehrig at first base. Sensing that wouldn't mean much playing time (Gehrig once played in 2,130 straight games), Greenberg signed with Detroit and by 1933 was a fixture in the Tiger lineup.

Whereas Campanella may have had to deal with racial discrimination, Greenberg, who is often called baseball's first Jewish superstar, had to cope with ignorance about and prejudice toward his faith.

In "Dingers," Peter Keating's excellent book about the history of home runs and the players who hit them, he says the Cubs rode Greenberg mercilessly during the 1935 World Series, won by the Tigers. Other times, he had to deal with "clueless" individuals, including reporters who covered Jewish individuals "almost as members of a different species – not necessarily negative, definitely apart." (Keating, by the way, calls the award-winning 1999 documentary "The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg" the best film ever made about a slugger. It took Aviva Kempner 13 years to produce it.)

As a babyboomer growing up in the 1960s, I was vaguely familiar with Greenberg from seeing a card of him among a special oldtimers' set. I knew few of the details, however, including that he had hit 58 home runs in 1938 or that his big-league career was twice interrupted by military service. He missed most all of the 1941 season after being drafted by the Army, and became the first major-leaguer to reenlist following the attack on Pearl Harbor later that year. Instead of opting for a stateside job, he elected to serve in the Army Air Corps in the China-Burma-India Theater.

Since the early 1970s, I've felt a minor attachment to Greenberg because his daughter once worked briefly as a copykid at The Christian Science Monitor while I was beginning my long career with the newspaper. I can't say we became friends. My recollection is that she was quiet and reserved, but I interpreted her presence at the Monitor as a sign of her family's admiration of quality journalism.

When the Postal Service dedicated the "Baseball Sluggers" stamps in the Bronx in July, Alva Greenberg was there. Curious about where life's path has taken her, I went online and discovered that she owns an art gallery, "Alva Gallery", in New London, Conn. According to the site, she was born in Cleveland in 1952, when her dad, who later became an investment banker, managed the Indians. Her love of art was cultivated in New York, however, while growing up among artists and collectors.

But getting back to her dad, one of the fascinating finds about his career is that Greenberg became baseball's first $100,000 player in January, 1947. And, ironically, this occurred after the Tigers placed him on waivers rather than raise his salary to $75,000. The Pirates signed him to the historic deal and saw him play just one season in Pittsburgh before retiring. Eventually he became part owner and general manager of the Cleveland Indians, and was with that team when it set an American League record with 111 wins in 1954. Many years later, Hammerin' Hank went to bat for another player seeking to make salary inroads, Curt Flood. Although Flood was unsuccessful in his attempt to overturn baseball's reserve clause, he set the stage for the free-agent era.

One can see that there's a lot of baseball history represented in these "Sluggers" postage stamps.

Collectors surely will value them, probably more than many of the baseball-themed commemoratives in circulation. Oddly enough, most of these (more than 400) have been issued by a host of countries other than the US, which didn't get around to honoring any individual players (Ruth, Gehrig, Jackie Robinson, and Roberto Clemente) until the 1980s.

The first foreign baseball stamp was issued in 1934 by the Philippines on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Olympics-like Far Eastern Championship Games. Over the years, many other countries have gotten into act, capitalizing on the interest from collectors that the USPS has been slow to satisfy.

Some of these stamps would surprise American fans, such as ones from the Central African Republic that bear the images of major-leaguers Roger Clemens and Robin Yount. Or the 1988 stamp issued by Canada on the 150th anniversary of baseball in that country, which calls into question who came first to the American "national pastime."

Whatever your taste in stamps, though, "Sluggers" are worthy additons to the march of commemorative stamps – and they pay timely tribute to some of the greats as we settle into watching baseball's annual postseason blitz.

Photos courtesy of the US Postal Service.

During my 35 years living in New England, I don't think I've ever seen a more popular Red Sox player than David Ortiz. Pitcher Luis Tiant once came close during the 1975 World Series season, and Johnny Damon was right up there too before he did the unthinkable and signed with the Yankees this year. And, yes, some might argue that Roger Clemens, Carl Yastrzemski, Ted Williams, Mo Vaughn, Pedro Martinez, and Nomar Garciaparra were unsurpassingly popular in their Beantown primes.

Still, Ortiz just might be No. 1 on the team's all-time pop chart. His universal appeal is that great. Why? Well, a combination of factors appear in play, including his long-ball power, incredible clutch hitting, lovable "Big Papi" nickname, and a cool-cat personality that plays well with fans of all ages and ethnicities.

Ortiz came from the Minnesota Twins in 2003, where he never hit more than 20 home runs in a single season, and has emerged as Boston's 21st century Sultan of Swat. He's also a legitimate American League MVP candidate – something no designated hitter has ever won – but because of the Red Sox' flameout he probably won't win either.

On Sept. 21, the jovial Dominican hit his 51st home run to set a new club record, bettering the 50 Jimmie Foxx belted in 1938. To celebrate his feat, the team brought in Foxx's daughter as well as Babe Ruth's granddaughter, Linda Ruth Tosetti, for a pre-game ceremony. The interesting thing is, Ruth went from hitting a personal high of 29 home runs in 1919, his last year with the Red Sox, to 54 the next year with the Yankees. Ortiz had 54 entering the season's final game Sunday. 

Pro stadium as college billboard

I guess I should have known that Arizona's new state-of-the-art stadium wouldn't be called Cardinals Stadium for long – not when it cost $455 million to build and there are hefty bills to be paid. In a refreshing twist, however, the NFL team has sold the facility's naming rights to a university with more students than any other private school in the country, but no football team: the University of Phoenix.

The college is really a network of commuter campuses in 39 states, with a total enrollment of 323,000 mostly working-adult students, but no varsity sports. In the words of Brian Mueller, president of Apollo Group, Inc., the university's parent company: "This is the first time a National Football League venue has been named after an educational institution, and the irony of that deal is not lost on us." The official name, the University of Phoenix Stadium, is likely to get shorthanded to UPS, so maybe the parcel service could be drawn in somehow – perhaps as a naming-rights partner or a major in-stadium advertiser.

Late-night railroad ride jars Nationals

Ah, for the good old days of train travel in professional sports. Well, maybe not. The Washington Nationals learned last week that riding the rails isn't always a smooth trip. The chartered Amtrak train the team was using to return from New York, after a series with the Mets, went off the track around Wilmington, Del., in what officials described as a "very minor detrailment." Nonetheless, it made the team so late (4:45 a.m.) in returning home that it skipped batting practice before its next game that same day in order to catch a few more winks.

Looking on the brighter side, catcher Brian Schneider said the derailment "just made for a longer card game." Learning that any team uses trains at this point was a revelation to me, and I assume to many others. The Nationals reportedly have taken the train to away games in New York and Philadelphia the past two seasons.

Where was all that jazz in New Orleans?

The biggest disappointment in the Saints' return to the Superdome had to be the entertainment. Sure, Bono and his U2 rock band might have been picked for their broad appeal and well established entertainment value, but this was New Orleans, and local jazz musicians should have been the featured attractions, not cast in the role of bit players.

This, after all, was not the Super Bowl, but a game with one unique theme, the restoration of a city. It was not a night for putting an Irish rock band at center stage. As my wife noted, the young people enlisted to serve as an energized on-field audience to U2 was almost entirely white, hardly a true reflection of the city's large black population that was so severely impacted by hurricane Katrina.

And speaking of the Superdome, I'd love to know what's sold by the stadium's food vendors. I've tried to call the Superdome offices, but haven't gotten an answer, and all I learn online is that the new concession stands have steel countertops. What's more important, it seems, is the menu and whether it offers such Bayou favorites such as gumbo, red beans and rice, pralines, beignets, and po-boy sandwiches, as well as various Cajun and Creole delights. If baseball's Brewers serve bratwurst and the Red Sox clam chowder, surely the Saints can cater to the special tastes of their fans.

It's sink or swim for college aquatics

In its weekly NCAA News publication, the National Collegiate Athletic Association has recently presented two interesting graphs, one showing participation by foreign athletes and another the participation gains by sport. Men's tennis has the highest percentage of foreign partcipation, with 14.7 percent, followed closely by men's and women's ice hockey (14.6 and 14.5 percent, respectively). Meanwhile, women's rowing witnessed a 96.6 percent increase in the number of participating student-athletes during a 10-year period ending in 2005. That was the biggest gain of any sport. Next came women's soccer (54.4 percent), women's lacrosse (52.1 percent), women's indoor track (47.6 percent), and men's lacrosse (28.1 percent).

Men's swimming and diving have experienced the worst undertow, losing 15.5 percent of their programs. That makes no sense, says Phillip Whitten, the executive director of the College Swimming Coaches Association. He told Swimming World magazine that their sport is acknowledged to be  probably the best all-around sport for maintaining lifetime fitness, yet college administrators drop swimming because not even the top programs generate revenue. Let's face it, the sport could use some fresh thinking to make it more appealing to spectators, who only seem to get interested in the swimming races during the Olympics.

No format changes are contemplated, but Whitten's organization plans to fight to keep every existing swimming program. How? By establlishing a legal-defense network of attorneys willing to challenge colleges that attempt to sink swimming and diving programs.

One of the saddest terminations occurred at UCLA in 1994, where the men's team was dropped in a state loaded with Olympic swimmers. Currently, Auburn University is the powerhouse in college swimming, both for women and men.

Touching other bases

• The National Football League has its share of intense coaches, but the guy who always looks like there's never any "relax" in him is Denver's Mike Shanahan. I think I saw him smile once, but not on the sidelines.

• Various sources rate Notre Dame's fight song the best there is, and many would agree that it's a nonpareil rouser. What few people probaby realize is that the "Notre Dame Victory March" was written by a couple of students and adopted years before it was ever played at a football game. Michael Shea, a 1905 graduate, wrote the music, and his brother John ('06) wrote the lyrics, including the famous "shake down the thunder" phrase – which, incidentally, was very apropos last week, when the Irish made a dramatic comeback during a heavy rainstorm to beat Michigan State. It was 10 years after the Shea brothers came up with the song that it was played at a sports event.

• Europe's best golfers took their American rivals to the woodshed again to win the Ryder Cup for a third straight time, but one European team member, Colin Montgomerie, is already a little concerned about a distant cup showdown, the one in 2014. That's when Monty's Scottish homeland will host the team competition at the Gleneagles course, but he worries that no Scotsman may be good enough to play for the Europeans. That truly would be a shame for the birthplace of golf. Montgomerie is the only Scot to play in the Ryder Cup in recent years. He and others in the country's golf community, however, think that hosting the cup could provide a welcome catalyst to rebuild Scotland's talent pool.

• Looking for a good sports debate? Then consider the question of which athletes expend the most energy in pursuing their sport.  For example, does a baseball outfielder exert himself more during a typical game than a NASCAR driver or professional golfer? Granted there are a lot of things that make these uneven comparisons, including that an outfielder may only make a few fielding plays per game and never have to run out a hit, while the auto racer is sweating in a tiny cockpit for hours. Even so, there's no denying that baseball is a stand-and-wait sport during long stretches.

• This has got to be an oddity: Quarterback Warren Moon had his jersey retired Sunday in a city in which he never played. Moon, who wore No. 1, was honored by the Tennessee Titans during a halftime ceremony in Nashville. That's because the Titans were the Houston Oilers in an earlier incarnation, and Houston was where Moon, a Hall of Famer, spent 10 of his 17 NFL seasons.

• Indiana University's 14-7 football loss to the University of Connecticut on Sept. 23 wasn't as jarring as the Hoosiers' total absence of rushing yardage. That's right, for the game they gained zero yards on the ground. Thinking that might represent the depths of futility, I checked the NCAA Record Book and discovered it isn't even close. Back in 1967, the University of Toledo held Northern Illinois University to a minus 109 yards on 33 rushing attempts.

• I'm beginning to think there's a quota that every NFL team must have at least one player with dreadlocks cascading out from under his helmet.

• A word to the wise: When accepting hand-me-down sports tickets, check them carefully before heading to the stadium. A co-worker learned this lesson the hard way recently, when she and three friends headed merrily off to Fenway Park with four corporate tickets in hand that one of them had acquired. At the turnstiles, however, the usher noticed that two tickets were for that night and two were for the next. Two of the friends had to go home and come back to watch the Red Sox get pounded 11-0.

• You rarely see a left-footed punter, but Virginia Tech has had nothing but lefties the past 12 seasons. Bryan Johnston, the school's assistant sports information director, says to chalk it up to "pure coincidence," not to some preference of the coaching staff. Next year's punter will be a righty.