Apparently, He Can Do It All, and Then Tell You All About It

There isn’t much Pittsburgh Pirate outfielder Barry Bonds can’t do. Just ask him. Bob Hertzel of the Pittsburgh Press made the mistake of doing so recently and ended up having to cancel his afternoon appointments.

Pool?

Bonds claims to have once defeated the great Minnesota Fats.

“I got the break and I ran the table on him,” he said.

Football?

A receiver, Bonds didn’t start playing until his sophomore year in high school, but remembers going deep on his first route. Touchdown.

“First time I touched the ball.”

Hoops?

“I could play. And slam? I could slam with two hands.”

Golf?

On one nasty little par-four, 315 yards, Bonds recounted driving the green with a two-iron.

Outdoor sports?

“Swim, water-ski, surf. I even snow-skied but I gave that up. I ain’t breaking my leg, man.”

Admittedly, there are a few things Bonds hasn’t mastered.

“I can’t play those Nintendo games,” he said.

Bonds also has trouble with arbitration hearings.

Add Mr. Everything: Bonds may want to concentrate on baseball. As of last weekend, he was batting .180.

In case you missed it: Last week, the Bakersfield Dodgers held a promotion called “Friday Night Live” for high school kids in the hope of encouraging them to take in a wholesome night of baseball instead of less-appealing alternatives.

No problem, except the promotion was staged Thursday night.

“We don’t have a Friday game this week,” a team official explained.

Trivia time: Who is the only major league pitcher to have won the strikeout and earned-run average titles in the same season but missed the Cy Young Award?

Sixty-something: For Jose Canseco of the Oakland Athletics, hitting 60 home runs in a season may be as difficult as driving the speed limit.

“It’s impossible,” said Canseco, who hasn’t hit more than 42 homers in one season. “Mark my words, it will never be done. Everybody has at least one good reliever.”

Wrong year: Reader Rudy Gapasin gets an assist for phoning in that center Wilt Chamberlain led the NBA in assists in the 1967-68 season, not 1966-67, as reported here Monday.

It’s Irrelevant, but . . . : Of the 15 players who have been crowned King of Irrelevance in the annual salute by a Newport Beach committee to the last pick of the NFL draft, 10 were cut in the exhibition season, three lasted one season, one lasted three seasons and another did not bother to report.

Trivia answer: Nolan Ryan. In 1987, while limited to 100 pitches a start by the Houston Astros’ management, Ryan finished 8-16 with 270 strikeouts and a 2.76 ERA.

Quotebook: Dennis Eckersley of the Oakland Athletics on the pitch he threw to Kirk Gibson in the ninth inning of Game 1 of the 1988 World Series: “It’s like the Kennedy assassination. Everyone I see comes up and tells me where they were and what they were doing when Gibson hit that home run.”