Mugger: Wordsworth Wasn't A Baseball Fan: Hey, sportswriters went to college too, and they can prove it.

Like many Americans, I’m looking forward to the upcoming baseball season. It’s a simple pleasure: Watching from the sidelines as my sons play in the Downtown Little League, hoping for a scorching line drive or diving infield catch, or even consoling one of them after three consecutive strikeouts, makes for an ideal spring or summer day.

Similarly, the beginning of Major League play brings another welcome diversion to our household. Before Opening Day, it’s possible to hope the Yankees will fall apart–especially this year, with George Steinbrenner publicly berating Derek Jeter and Joe Torre, two Bomber legends–and that the Boston Red Sox will finally win a World Series during my lifetime.

I’ll make my annual charity $25 bets that Fenway Park next year will fly its first championship flag since 1918. Still, I fear Pedro Martinez or Manny Ramirez will be injured by May, and that new Sox General Manager Theo Epstein’s thorough humiliation of Shea Hillenbrand will continue until the all-star third baseman is traded for next to nothing. And then becomes the next Jeff Bagwell. Who knows, maybe George Herman Millar, hijacked from the Chunichi Dragons, will actually hit 25 homers, beating out Jeremy Giambi for the top second-tier Bosox off-season acquisition.

Meanwhile, the Yanks are a lock to win 100 games, even if Roger Clemens doesn’t notch his 300th victory until August, Jorge Posada falls apart behind the plate and David Wells’ back gives out for good by June. And a second-place A.L. East finish probably won’t earn the Bosox a wild-card spot, not with the White Sox poised for a monstrous season, along with the A’s and Angels.

Wait a minute! This is supposed to be an optimistic assessment of my team, especially since not one infield error has cost Derek Lowe a win. Maybe the cynicism comes from the annual onslaught of sportswriters (the Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy blights an already abysmal newspaper) attempting to show the world that like The New Yorker’s Roger Angell and pundit George Will, they can use $25 words in describing basket catches and stolen bases.

Tom Verducci, in the Feb. 24 Sports Illustrated, was the first this year to elevate baseball to a metaphor for life and world affairs. He opened an article on spring training with a bang:

"Hope, Aristotle divined, is the dream of a waking man. America, at midwinter in a post-9/11 world, challenged that notion last week.

"Hundreds of bits of a spacecraft still lay strewn along miles of the Bible Belt [I’ll ignore that slur for right now]. Duct tape, the classic punch line of handyman humor, suddenly became a serious staple of civilian defense [only for Maureen Dowd and Sally Quinn] against dirty bombs that might come from unknown agents of war. And the words weapons of mass destruction rolled too easily off the tongue, included in the foreboding drumbeat of news from the Middle and Far East. [Verducci’s a Howard Dean voter, I’m betting.] While much of the country listened for diversionary sounds of encouragement, the too-familiar scrape of a snow shovel upon the driveway or chattering of teeth against February’s chill only mired them in a deeper state of blue.

"And just then, last Friday, on Valentine’s Day morning as it happened [what’s love got to do with it?], hope, as Aristotle knew it, made its presence felt in Mesa, Ariz. The Chicago Cubs’ pitchers, whose degree of wakefulness in recent years could be questioned by philosophers of absolutely no repute, began their first workout of spring training. Hey, with hope–as with love, charity and a good full-bodied red wine–no helping is too modest or too insignificant to nourish the spirit."

In addition, Verducci tossed in Dr. Seuss, Ponce de Leon, John Calvin (referring to Bosox diehards, who are "Cubs fans without the sense of humor"), the Koran, Wordsworth, Charlie Brown and John Updike.

The Daily News’ Dick Young might’ve been a bigoted prick, but I’d take his baseball articles over the likes of Verducci’s any day.

Tort Reform Now

It wouldn’t bother me a whit if every McDonald’s in the country shuttered their doors, although my kids would go nuts, but anyone with a sense of pure justice has to sympathize with the besieged company. Not only are profits in the toilet, with the rise of the Subway chain, but the avalanche of newspaper stories sympathizing with fat children who blame Big Macs for their youthful spreads is a travesty. And let’s not forget the constant stream of lawsuits.

The most ridiculous one recently occurred in Panama City Beach, FL, where a couple sued the local McDonald’s for more than $15,000 because the husband bought a bagel that wasn’t to his satisfaction.

An attorney, no doubt working on contingency, whose shingle is probably above a Toys "R" Us in some strip mall, dreamed up a dandy of a complaint in trying to extort some dough from the local franchisee. According to a Feb. 4 Associated Press report, John and Cecelia O’Hare said an allegedly bum bagel "damaged the husband’s teeth and their marriage... The suit alleges the wife ‘lost the care, comfort, consortium and society of her husband.’"

This is what’s called legal grift.

Messed-up bridgework is no fun, but if that relatively minor medical malady is enough to break up a marriage, the O’Hares’ must not have a very strong union to begin with. The lawsuit’s an insult to all the couples who cope with real problems–Alzheimer’s, ovarian or brain cancer, heart disease, just for starters–and stick together, "for better or worse," as the traditional wedding vows go.

The O’Hares’ abuse of the courts, it must be said, is minor compared to the guilty verdict slapped against Manhattan hotelier Leona Helmsley–admittedly an extraordinarily obnoxious woman–earlier this month. Charles Bell, a former employee at Helmsley’s Park Lane Hotel, was awarded the obscene amount of $11.2 million after suing "The Queen of Mean" for sexual discrimination. The gay man, who worked at Park Lane for four months, was awarded $1.17 million for lost wages and compensation and an astonishing $10 million in punitive damages.

It may be that Helmsley was guilty as charged, and who’s to quarrel with a jury deciding that she fired Bell simply because he’s gay. But where in the world does the $10 million in "punitive damages" come from? The 48-year-old Bell hit the jackpot. He worked a mere four months, allegedly endured his employer’s disgusting taunts and emerges not only a multimillionaire (minus his lawyer’s fees) but an instant hero in the gay community. Not bad for less than a year’s labor.

One assumes the jury’s ridiculous judgment will be reduced on appeal, but considering Helmsley’s reputation, probably not by much. The real villain in this case is Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Walter Tolub, who told the jury before their deliberation that Helmsley, 82, had a net worth of between $3.2 and $4 billion, an utterly irrelevant fact. The man should be prosecuted himself for jury-tampering, but I suppose he was sent bottles of champagne from grateful trial lawyers across the city.

Oh, one more. Last Friday, according to the Associated Press, a kindergarten teacher in Kansas City, MO was sued for $25,000 for allegedly "binding [a student] to his chair with tape." The moronic teacher, DaMara Lashley–aptly named–along with principal Rick Mills, "a staunch believer in corporal punishment," were both suspended.

If true, there’s no defense for Lashley and Mills, and both ought to be fired immediately. But what’s with the lawsuit? You’d think that the young victim, who was probably humiliated by the incident, would gain revenge if the Kansas City School District acted responsibly and purged its system of both the defendants and any other teacher who uses corporal punishment as a means of behavior control. Just imagine if the United States was as litigious a society generations ago when parochial school students were routinely subjected to degrading treatment by nuns. The docket of lawsuits would be backed up to this day.

One of my uncles, for example, regularly had his knuckles rapped with a ruler because, as a lefty, he couldn’t adapt quickly enough to the enforced rule that penmanship was performed only by the right hand. But it never occurred to my grandparents, Irish immigrants raising a family in the Bronx, to sue the school system.

It’s a reminder that once upon a time in America, the phrase "trial lawyer" wasn’t an obscenity.

Still Waiting

Hmm. It’s Feb. 24 and the new directive of punching 1 plus an area code to make a local call still hasn’t gone into effect. At least not downtown. Frankly, I’ve never understood the fuss over this very slight inconvenience, or, for that matter, the notion that a 212 area code was a measure of status. It’s just evolution: Does anyone want the return of rotary phones or the exorbitant cost of long-distance phone calls? One thing’s a bit odd, though: Although I can’t count the amount of phone numbers I’ve had in 47 years, the only one I remember is from my boyhood home in Huntington. It comes in an instant: HA(amilton)1-1441.

Choke on It, Marie

As a word-processor for a regional daily, Newsday’s Marie Cocco isn’t particularly well-known, but her columns are irritating nonetheless. A committed Bush-antagonist, Cocco used her space on Feb. 20 not only to belittle the president for his comments on the antiwar marches last week, but to express solidarity with France as well.

To the first point, Cocco writes: "The president can say he respects differences of opinion with his policies. But this is as if he were to declare, quite suddenly, that he has ‘respect’ for the fact that Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000. He doesn’t. And everyone knows it."

The beginning of her piece was enough to make even Jimmy Breslin retch. She says, in a bad imitation of Maureen Dowd: "I ate the brie. I consumed every voluptuous, decadent, waist-expanding morsel. I smeared it on firm crusts of bread and sometimes ate it without benefit of accompaniment. I washed it down with a nice burgundy that made the trip across the Atlantic with my husband, arriving just before the big storm."

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