Beaned Player’s Retirement Proved Politically Correct

Nearly 45 years ago, two promising center fielders began their professional baseball careers.

One, Mickey Mantle, received a signing bonus of $1,100 from the New York Yankees. The other, Matt Cuomo, got $2,000 from the Pittsburgh Pirates and was assigned to the Brunswick team in the Georgia-Florida League. In 1952, Cuomo batted .244 with one home run, 26 runs batted in and seven steals in 81 games, before being beaned.

He retired from the game after that season and entered law school. Mantle is now in the Baseball Hall of Fame, while Cuomo, who went back to using his real first name, Mario, is in his third term as New York’s governor.

Trivia time: Which candidate for governor of California was an all-Pacific 10 football player?

Spreading the word: The Los Angeles Sports Council’s “LA Sports” logo, according to the Amateur Athletic Foundation’s Sports Letter, has brought in more than $1 million in nine months in sales of everything from caps, parkas and socks to seat covers and tissue boxes.

Priorities: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Gene Collier calls Buddy Ryan “perhaps America’s favorite 12-year-old.” But he acknowledges the public’s curiosity about the new Phoenix Cardinal coach.

“In January of 1991,” Collier writes, “the Philadelphia Daily News ran two telephone polls, one on the sanctions-or-weapons question that would soon trigger the Persian Gulf War, the other on whether Ryan should be retained or fired.

“The war issue drew 1,638 responses. The Ryan question drew 12,359 calls and 40 faxes.”

Message heard: Ken Head is a Fullerton police captain and owner of the Say No to Drugs funny car dragster. He and his driver, Dennis Taylor, recently visited the teen-age American Indian ward of the Gila River (Ariz.) Juvenile Detention Center. Head told a group of 40 youths about the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse and told how his former partner, Tom De La Rosa, was murdered during a 1990 drug bust.

Head said he was amazed when one of the teen-agers “came up to me after our program and apologized for my partner’s death.”

Different views: Keith Agre of Beverly Hills questions a recent Morning Briefing item that said the NBA started in 1946. He claims it started in 1949 as a consolidation of the Basketball Assn. of America and the National Basketball League, after a bitter three-year rivalry. Both viewpoints are correct; the NBA considers itself the direct descendant of the NBL.

Trivia answer: John Garamendi, California offensive guard in 1965.

Quotebook: Larry Himes, Chicago Cub general manager, after hearing the Dodgers will pay second-year catcher Mike Piazza $4.2 million for three years: “People in baseball consider the Piazza contract a joke. Why would they do that?”