Rotisserie Baseball

Tom Werner, veteran rotisserie league baseball exec, tipped his hand when he was drafting his 1990 team a couple of weeks back. "After the sixth round," he said, "someone said, 'Tom, can you tell us why everyone you've drafted has been a San Diego Padre?' " Werner could, but didn't. One way or the other, it seemed, he was going to own the Padres this year.

They approached their work as usual, preparing for another game in a long season. They spoke as if nothing had changed, because that's what professionals are supposed to do in times like these. But the Dodgers weren't fooling themselves. They were stunned by the news Friday that the Dodgers had agreed to trade all-star catcher Mike Piazza to the Florida Marlins in a multi-player deal that also included third baseman Todd Zeile.

Item: An editor at one of New York's most prestigious publishing companies is heading for a two-week European vacation. "I'm really worried," he tells a friend. "I wouldn't be," the friend assures him. "There hasn't been a single incidence of terrorism in a while." "Terrorism?" the editor says. "Who cares about terrorism? I'm worried about leaving my rotisserie team." Item: The phone rings in the Boston hotel room of Angels Manager Gene Mauch last season.

As a major league baseball fan, you know the players are greedy and arrogant. The owners, on the other hand, are greedy, arrogant and incompetent, led by a man whose team is 27 1/2 games out of first place. Both forgot long ago that theirs is the only sport that formally acknowledges the value of sacrifice. So, if the players strike today and the World Series is canceled, where can a baseball fan get his fix? Books and films on baseball might help, but which ones?

I can remember a spring, not too many years ago, when a prolonged New York newspaper strike threatened to extend itself into the baseball season, and my obsessively fannish mind tried to contemplate the desert prospect of a summer without daily box scores. The thought was impossible; it was like trying to think about infinity. --Roger Angell in "The Summer Game" These are critical weeks for Brad Bunshaft.

The New York Mets, with the success of the cross-town Yankees adding insult to an array of injuries, dealt for the star power of Mike Piazza on Friday, trading three prospects to the Florida Marlins for the former Dodger catcher.

Sixty-four reasons why the NCAA basketball tournament continues to reign as the greatest sporting spectacle in the land: 1. It's not baseball. 2. No such thing as the Poulan Weedeater Southeast Sub-Regional. 3. Maximum of six chances to root against Bob Knight. 4. Office pools. Anyone can enter, even normal people, unlike Rotisserie baseball. 5. To get an extension here, Jim Harrick will have to earn it. 6.

Washington It's the ultimate inside-the-Beltway fantasy, a political tease too titillating to surrender, because it ends with the prospect of two women running against one another for president of the United States in 2008. Or, in some scripts, it ends with the clash of two dynasties, a titanic grudge match that will determine the most powerful family in the most powerful nation on the planet. Plot too tired, movie been done? Well maybe in Hollywood, but in Washington, fantasy politics is all the buzz.

Wayne Gretzky paid $11.10 to get left-hander Mark Langston. The Angels had to give Langston $16 million and the shirt off Doug Rader's back. Gretzky, an avid baseball fan, got Langston's services at a bargain rate for his rotisserie baseball league.