Maybe Tarot Cards Will Replace Baseball Cards

Jason Giambi, the Oakland A’s American League most valuable player, acknowledges to consulting a psychic, Azra Shafi-Scagliarini, once or twice a day during the season.

“Azra clears my mind before the game and my career has really taken off,” he told Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle. “So far, everything she’s told me has been right.”

Azra, however, acknowledges she does not know much about baseball.

“It’s only been in the last two years that I stopped calling the bullpen ‘the pigpen,’ ” she said.

*

More on Azra: Former A’s pitcher Ron Darling, a Yale graduate who introduced Giambi to Shafi-Scagliarini, says, “She’s like Nostradamus, but with a better body. She’s omniscient.”

*

Trivia time: Who was the first driver to win on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s new Grand Prix road course?

*

Shooting high: If you think golf fees are going sky high in Southern California, don’t go to Northern California.

The new CordeValley Golf Club course, near Santa Clara, has a greens fee of $330 for 18 holes.

“In our opinion, we’re a course that’s comparable to Pebble Beach,” the club’s marketing director, Jimmy Stewart, told Golf Digest.

The tab at Pebble Beach is $350.

*

Looking ahead: Take heart, baseball fans, only four months till opening day 2001. But it will be in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where Texas will play Toronto on April 1.

The rest of us must wait another day . . . or night.

*

Lesson learned: There will be no Dennis Miller in Canada.

“Hockey Night in Canada,” north of the border’s counterpart to “Monday Night Football,” has rejected the idea of putting Canadian-born comedian Jim Carrey on the show.

The hockey show, a staple for 13 years, is much too revered for such experimentation, said producer Joel Darling.

*

Sound familiar? Construction of the Cincinnati Reds’ new ballpark could be behind schedule before it even begins because bids for the concrete-and-steel superstructure are $22 million over Hamilton County’s budget estimate.

Officials are trying to figure out why the concrete bid was $59.4 million when the estimate was $42 million.

*

Sound familiar (again)? The concrete foundation of the 2002 Olympic speedskating oval in Salt Lake City must be torn up and repoured, again threatening competition scheduled for the $27-million facility.

*

Hometown boy: Hockey superstar Eric Lindros, a restricted free agent recovering from head injuries, is lobbying for a move away from the Philadelphia Flyers.

“I’d really like to play in Toronto. It’s a great organization, a great city and being from there, it just seems to be a good fit,” Lindros said.

*

Closing in: Utah Jazz forward Karl Malone needs only 48 more points to equal Wilt Chamberlain’s 31,419 for second place on the NBA’s all-time scoring list.

*

Trivia answer: If you answered Michael Schumacher, you were wrong. Another German, Bernd Maylander, won a Porsche Pirelli Supercup race there the day before Schumacher won the Formula One race in September.

*

And finally: World soccer’s governing body, FIFA, is aiming to produce future club owners and administrators by introducing a college course on its game.

The course--the International Master (Master’s of Art) in the Management, Law and Humanities of Sport--will include the study of the history, culture, sociology and ethics of soccer, plus courses on sports management and law in sports.

Maybe they can find a way to settle 0-0 ties.