Whatever This Guy Has to Say Carries an Awful Lot of Weight

Milwaukee infielder Gus Polidor is no lightweight at 180 pounds, but he was badly overmatched in a recent encounter with umpire Ken Kaiser, who gave him the boot.

Asked why he was ejected, Polidor said: “Kaiser was standing on my foot and I asked him to get off. He told me to shut up and get back in my hole.”

Kaiser, a former pro wrestler, weighs 288.

Add umpires: The National League has so may overweight umpires that it stopped listing their weights in the media guide because it was embarrassing.

Eric Gregg, heaviest of all, recently was given a leave of absence and sent to the weight-loss clinic at Duke University.

Gregg checked in at 383.

Add Gregg: In his book, “Working the Plate,” he recalled this incident: “One day someone told me that my girlfriend would be arriving at the park in the fifth inning.

“I’m thinking, ‘What girlfriend? I don’t have a girlfriend.’

“Then in the fifth inning the Goodyear blimp flew overhead.”

Trivia Time: What do Joe Hardy and Roy Hobbs have in common?

Confusion reigns: From Jim Van Vliet of the Sacramento Bee: “Ron Fairly, the grating backup voice of the San Francisco Giants, was his eloquent self last weekend. On one broadcast he noted, ‘The Giants are so confused that when they faced Montreal’s Mark Gardner last week, they thought it was Wes Gardner. . . . Wes Gardner, of course, pitches for Baltimore.’ Close, Ronny. Try Boston.”

Hit the road: Bumper sticker in Georgia: “Go Braves . . . and Take the Falcons With You.”

How’s that?: NASCAR driver Neil Bonnett, recuperating from an accident that left him with a case of amnesia, paid a visit to Bobby Allison, whose career-ending crash in 1988 left him with slurred speech.

Bonnett: “Between Bobby trying to say what he was thinking and me trying to remember what he said, it was a hell of a conversation.”

Handyman: From New York Yankee owner George Steinbrenner: “I used to be very hands-on, but lately I’ve been more hands-off, and I plan to become more hands-on and less hands-off and hope that hands-on will become better than hands-off, the way hands-on used to be.”

Casey Stengel couldn’t have said it better.

Post-mortem: TNT analyst Doug Collins, on the demise of the Lakers: “The loss of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar hurt them more in the playoffs. They could rely on him to make something happen as the 24-second clock wound down.”

Trivia answer: Both are movie baseball heroes--Hardy (Tab Hunter) in “Damn Yankees,” Hobbs (Robert Redford) in “The Natural.”

Quotebook: CBS-TV basketball analyst Bill Raftery, asked if he would ever return to coaching: “Have you ever seen me coach?”