Mariners’ Riggleman got his start here

By Ron Kantowski

Monday, June 23, 2008 | 5:32 p.m.

NOW:

Veteran Las Vegas baseball fans may recall that Jim Riggleman, who last weekend was named interim manager of the Seattle Mariners, got his managerial start in Las Vegas.

Riggleman spent two seasons as skipper of the Las Vegas Stars, guiding them to a 65-75 record in 1991 and a 74-70 mark the next year. Of all the nice guys and the one cranky one (Larry Bowa) who have managed the Stars and 51s, he might have been the nicest.

After leaving Las Vegas, Riggleman went onto manage the then-parent Padres for two years and the Cubs for five. He guided Chicago to a wild card playoff berth in 1998, the year Sammy Sosa uncorked -- pun intended -- 66 home runs.

The Mariners won their first game with Riggleman at the helm Friday night but then lost the next two to the Braves. They are last in the AL West, trailing the first-place Angels by 19 1/2 games.

----- Suspended NFL football player Pacman Jones doesn't want to be called by his nickname anymore. He wants to be called "Adam" or "Mr. Jones." In a related note, Adam West, the actor who played "Batman" on TV, said because "Pacman" is no longer being used, he wouldn't mind if people called him that.

----- Stewart Cink won the Travelers Championship, last weekend's PGA Tour stop. He was followed by Hunter Mahan and Tommy Armour III, who attended Bishop Gorman. Get used to it, golf fans. That's probably the way the leader board is going to look until Tiger's knee gets better.

----- We're still checking this one out, but there was a report out of Tucson that the 51s' Terry Tiffee used a Wiffle bat Sunday -- and still went 2-for-4. Tiffee has been red-hot since the Dodgers sent him back down and continues to lead the PCL with a .407 batting average.

----- Prediction: Tiffee finishes with a higher average than the Braves' Chipper Jones. Last week Jones was hobbling around with a bum leg and the dummies on ESPN were saying he had a realistic shot to hit .400 this season. He was hitting .420 then; he's hitting .393 now -- and it's still only June. Jones, a lifetime .310 hitter, has not hit higher than .337, which he did last year. Plus, he's pretty slow, even when his leg doesn't hurt.

THEN:

When I was a kid, I remember reading a book called "Strange But True Baseball Stories." The following anecdote wasn't in there, but it should have been.

In 1963, Gaylord Perry, a great pitcher but a lousy hitter, was said to have joked that a man would land on the moon before he hit a home run. Six years later, on July 20, 1969 -- just a few minutes after Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the lunar surface -- Perry hit the first homer of his Hall-of-Fame career.

No, Bill "Spacemen" Lee didn't serve it up. That would have been really strange.