Boston Red Sox Baseball Team

Pete Kuld mulled the unpleasant terminology for a moment, then laughed. There are worse things in life than name-calling, he reasoned. "I guess they'll call us scab players," Kuld said. "That's what everybody called them when it happened in football." Kuld, a former catcher at Chatsworth High, agreed this week to sign a triple-A contract with the Boston Red Sox and said he intends to cross the picket lines if the six-month-long major league players' strike continues into the regular season.

In what might have had as much to do with personality as performance, Mo Vaughn of the Boston Red Sox edged Albert Belle of the Cleveland Indians in voting for the American League most-valuable-player award. In results announced Thursday, a 28-member committee of the Baseball Writers Assn. of America chose the popular and accessible Vaughn over the often rude and uncooperative Belle by an eight-point margin, making it the fifth-closest MVP election in league history.

Tim Wakefield's professional fortunes have danced, dipped, risen and fallen like one of the unpredictable, 60-m.p.h. knuckleballs he lobs toward home plate. Now, bad or good, in control or not, Wakefield will try to keep the Boston Red Sox alive tonight in Game 3 of their best-of-five playoff series against Cleveland. The Indians lead, 2-0, having brushed aside Roger Clemens in Game 1 and Erik Hanson in Game 2.

The two best teams in the American League meet starting tonight at Jacobs Field to prove which is better, of course, but also to bury a pair of curses. The curse of the Bambino has become as much a part of Red Sox lore as Ted Williams' hitting. Remember 1986, for example? Bill Buckner fails to pick up that slow roller in Game 6 of the World Series against the New York Mets. Red Sox fans remember. The curse of Rocky Colavito is as much a part of Cleveland history as Bob Feller's fastball.

The end for the 1995 Angels did not come nearly as swift as it did for the 1986 Angels, who were one out away from the World Series before blowing Game 5 and losing to Boston in the American League playoffs. Compared to calamitous 1986, when the typhoon that was Donnie Moore-to-Dave Henderson blew through Anaheim and left complete destruction in its wake, the end of 1995 was more a persistent rainstorm, with dark clouds hovering above the Angels for six weeks.

Dan Duquette's decision to let Roger Clemens leave the Boston Red Sox after the 1996 season still generates ridicule. The studious general manager inspected Clemens' 40-39 record over four seasons, and concluded the then-34-year-old "Rocket" had only so much life left. Duquette watched Clemens sign with the Toronto Blue Jays, wishing him well in the "twilight of his career." Some twilight.

The existing tickets for the Dodgers' March 29 exhibition game at the Coliseum were sold out within an hour of being put on sale to the general public Saturday morning. By 11 a.m., the 90,505 tickets available for the game against the Boston Red Sox were gone. For the Dodgers, who are celebrating their 50th season in Los Angeles, the game will mark a return to the venue they called home from 1958 to '61. The team moved into Dodger Stadium in 1962.

FORT MYERS, Fla. -- Mark Prather remembers when Red Sox Nation was a small country, like Luxembourg or Orange County. "Old-school people like me have been loving them forever," said Prather, decked out in an old-school Carl Yastrzemski jersey as he took in an early spring exhibition game here. "Now you have a second group that are like, 'Let's jump on the bandwagon.' There's a transition." "Yeah," added fellow fan Dan Gosslin from inside his Carlton Fisk T-shirt.

Matt Young was vacationing on a boat in Catalina on Saturday night when his cellphone and the phones of his two kids started lighting up and vibrating with calls and text messages. The Dodgers had become the fifth team in baseball's modern era to win a game without a hit, defeating the Angels, 1-0, despite the efforts of right-handers Jered Weaver and Jose Arredondo, who combined for eight no-hit innings.