Scorecard

	DUMMIES (MORGAN)	IDIOTS (BENCH)
Foreword by	Sparky Anderson	Tom Seaver
First baseball team	New York Knickerbockers , 1842	New York Knickerbockers , 1845
A bonehead play is...	"A mental error"	"A stupid mental error"
Second thoughts	"Second base is a paradox"	"The second baseman is Baryshnikov"
Unbreakable one-season record	DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak	DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak
Unbreakable career record	Cy Young 's 512 wins	Cy Young 's 511 wins (Bench is right)
Best ever	Mays	Mantle
Back-scratching	Morgan calls Bench one of the 10 best fielders ever	Bench puts Morgan at 2B in his alltime lineup
Fashion statement	"[Wear] a white fox cape and the umpires won't permit you on the field"	"This sleeker style [of pants] doesn't exactly flatter...beer-guzzling players like... David Wells "
Jocktalk	"Male ballplayers should never take the field without wearing a jock strap (athletic supporter) and protective cup. You don't really need to ask why, do you?"	"I found that if I wore a tighter jock over the one with the cup holder, it held everything in place"

WNBA Labor Fight
Transition Game

The WNBA must have studied recent history and decided that the way to be taken seriously as a pro league is to get into an old-fashioned, my-lawyers-can-whip-your-lawyers labor dispute. How else to explain last week's collective bargaining tap dance? The WNBA and its players' union had reached a tentative agreement when the whole thing fell apart with each side blaming the other. By Monday a deal seemed inches away again.

Reprising the NBA 's recent labor strife made little sense for either side, but it was a particularly dangerous path for the players, who were sure to find it easier to dunk from the foul line than to beat the NBA machine at the bargaining table. Make no mistake—it's the NBA , which owns and operates the WNBA , that the women have been battling. The negotiating team that knocked out the men's union threw the same combinations at the women: tantalizing them with a near deal before backing off, and hinting that the league can withstand a work stoppage much longer than they can.

WNBA president Val Ackerman's comments last week could have been lifted from transcripts of NBA commissioner David Stern 's calculated hand-wringing during the lockout. "Unless this is done very quickly, the season is threatened," Ackerman said. "It will be all or nothing." Anyone who remembers the "framework of a deal" that Stern spoke of during the lockout—the framework that didn't work—experienced d�j� vu when a deal was initially announced only to fall through, forcing postponement of the WNBA 's April 27 draft of college and former ABL players.

Apportioning blame for delaying an agreement only leads to a game of "she said, she said." The sides had agreed to increase minimum salaries from $15,000 last season to $30,000 for veterans and $25,000 for rookies, while adding such benefits as a pension fund, life insurance and paid maternity leave. But according to Ackerman, the union tried to renegotiate parts of the deal. Union leader Pamela Wheeler says it was the league that demanded new terms, including a wage freeze for the next four rookie classes.

The NBA hasn't won any fans by battling the women over sums that amount to tip money for its male stars. Still, the league had almost all the leverage from the tip-off. WNBA players can't help worrying about their livelihoods and the future of women's pro basketball, but if they thought the NBA cared about anything more lofty than the bottom line, they know better now.
—Phil Taylor

Boxing Reform
Going Round And Round

After the last of Saturday's three tide fights at the MCI Center in Washington, D.C. , Don King lauded the open-scoring system used in the bouts. Boxing people "love having a difference of opinion," said King , "but progress demands we come into the 21st century."

During Mark Johnson 's decision over Ratanachai Vorapin for the IBF junior bantamweight belt and Keith Holmes's seventh-round knockout of Hassine Cherifi for the WBC middleweight title, judges' scores were announced every four rounds. In Sharmba Mitchell's decision over Reggie Green for the WBA super lightweight belt, scores were announced after each round.

One criticism of open scoring is that it can encourage the guy who's ahead to play it safe, and that's what Johnson did on Saturday. After hearing he was up after eight rounds, says Johnson , "I thought, Why should I go out there and fight 9, 10, 11 and 12?"