It’s Just a Rumor That Doubleday Asked His Advice

Dennis Eckersley isn’t really the 2000-year-old man recast as bullpen closer, it only seems that way.

“The Eck has been around so long, he has something in common with Sandy Koufax, Whitey Ford and Sal Maglie,” writes Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe. “He pitched to Hank Aaron.

“Eckersley is a walking baseball encyclopedia of the last quarter-century. He was a rookie on the Cleveland Indians’ bench when Frank Robinson became the major leagues’ first black manager in April 1975. Eck pitched against Brooks Robinson and played six seasons with Carl Yastrzemski. He faced Luis Tiant in the Red Sox home opener in 1975, and won 20 games for the Sox when Boston collapsed in ’78.

“His first group of Red Sox teammates have gone on to become broadcasters (Jerry Remy), managers (Butch Hobson), coaches (Jim Rice), deadbeat dads (Dick Drago), and Hall of Famers (Yaz, soon Carlton Fisk).”

Eckersley, actually only 43, is back with the Red Sox this spring. Recently, he pitched to a young catcher named Steve Lomasney, who wasn’t born until Eckersley was in the middle of his third major league season.

*

Trivia time: What, besides having played for the Lakers, do Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor and Jerry West have in common?

*

Foot in mouth, not on ball: After signing with the English soccer club Barnsley, Macedonian midfielder Georgi Hristov enraged South Yorkshire by describing the town’s female population as “far uglier” than the women in his home country and not worthy of his attention.

“Sadly,” the English soccer magazine Four Four Two reports, “Hristov had neglected to notice that his own face bears an uncanny resemblance to [buttocks].”

*

The search continues: Major league baseball has been without a full-time commissioner since 1992, when the owners fired Fay Vincent, but owners who’d hoped to vote on a new one at their meetings in Florida this week will have to settle for a search update.

Owner Jerry McMorris of the Colorado Rockies, head of the search committee, said the committee could be ready to recommend one or more candidates sometime next month.

“We have a number of supremely qualified people,” he said. “There’s been a bunch.”

Do you suppose Pete Rose made the short list?

*

For the record: The name of 1950s songstress Jo Stafford was misspelled in Monday’s Morning Briefing.

*

Trivia answer: Each of them was named outstanding player of the NCAA tournament while playing for a team that did not win the tournament. Chamberlain won the award with Kansas in 1957, Baylor with Seattle in 1958 and West with West Virginia in 1959.

*

And finally: The Montreal Expos groom young baseball players, then customarily lose them on the open market when those youngsters become stars. The franchise has one of the tightest budgets in the majors, so there’s little the Expos can do to reverse that trend.

But they are doing something about losing baseballs. They marked their spring training balls with black X’s to make sure they don’t wind up in other teams’ equipment bags. The team is trying to conserve balls to save money.