Maybe This Other Guy Has a Good Arm

The Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Cubs and newspapers that include the Hartford Courant and Los Angeles Times, is involved in a lawsuit with Mark Guthrie.

Not the former Cub pitcher.

This Mark Guthrie delivers papers for the Courant.

The problem stems from an error that resulted in money meant for Guthrie the relief pitcher being sent to the bank account of Guthrie the deliveryman. There were three payments made totaling $301,000, the last of which was made last October.

The Cubs realized the error five weeks after the final payment and managed to take back $275,000 before Guthrie the paper man froze his account.

The club sued for the money in February, but last month offered to drop the court case if it was repaid the final $26,000.

A Cub spokesman said there were no hard feelings, the team just wants its money back.

Guthrie the deliveryman says it isn’t that simple, that he wants to make sure he doesn’t have “tax liabilities” as a result of the mistake.

As for Guthrie the pitcher, well, he’s a free agent.

Trivia time: Who was the first major league player to hit 66 home runs in a season?

Looking back: On this date in 1995, the Harlem Globetrotters’ 24-year, 8,829-game winning streak came to an end with a 91-85 loss to a team led by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in a competitive, unscripted game in Vienna, Austria.

Style points: Washington Post columnist Tony Kornheiser is thrilled to see Deion Sanders back in the NFL, this time with the Baltimore Ravens.

“Deion is one of those rare men in professional sports whose clothing is so complicatedly patterned and so luxuriously mixed and matched that they can be worn as an outfit one day, and used as a throw rug the next.”

Mission accomplished: Virginia punter Sean Johnson spent the last two years on a Mormon mission -- in Las Vegas.

“There’s probably a lot of sinners out there to convert,” Virginia Coach Al Groh told the Newport News (Va.) Daily Press.

Added Dwight Perry of the Seattle Times, on Johnson’s spending time in Sin City, “That’s one way to make yourself a blue chipper.”

Weighing in: For Saturday’s middleweight unification bout, Oscar De La Hoya and Bernard Hopkins will fight at 158 pounds.

That’s only about 156 pounds heavier than the program for the fight.

According to publicist Fred Sternburg, “It’s literally the biggest boxing program ever produced, weighing in at nearly two pounds and the first to ever exceed 100 pages, 112 pages to be exact.”

Trivia answer: The Chicago Cubs’ Sammy Sosa, who was caught and eventually passed by Mark McGwire in the final week of the 1998 season. McGwire finished with 70 homers and his record was eclipsed by Barry Bonds’ 73 homers in 2001.

And finally: The New York Post’s back-page headline, referring to U.S. Open chair umpire Mariana Alves’ being dismissed after blowing calls in Serena Williams’ loss to Jennifer Capriati, “Adieu, Mrs. Magoo.”