Scorecard

A REMINDER
It was reported last week that a five-member owners' disciplinary committee had fined Milwaukee Brewer General Manager Harry Dalton $50,000 for speaking his mind to the Washington Post concerning baseball's labor negotiations, which are expected to end in a players' strike on May 29. The committee apparently thought Dalton had deviated from the party line by sounding too dovish about the negotiations. The fine—indeed, the very existence of a committee empowered to impose such a whopping penalty—suggests that the owners don't much trust one another, a possibility further borne out, as it happens, by the dispute itself. By asking the players to consent to the payment of stiffer compensation by teams signing free agents, the owners are hoping to put a lid on salaries, which have soared for the simple reason that the owners are unable to control themselves or one another. Labor-management dispute? The fine imposed on Dalton serves as a reminder that this is also very much a management-management dispute.

ALL-AMERICA LOSERS

Not counting punters or placekickers, 47 different college football players were honored last season on All-America teams chosen by the AP, UPI, Football Writers Association, Newspaper Enterprise Association, Football News, Walter Camp and Kodak. All 47 played for schools that had winning seasons. The selectors of those teams are either sports-writers or college coaches. By contrast, two players from losing teams, Texas Tech Defensive Back Ted Watts and Wake Forest Guard Bill Ard, earned All-America recognition from The Sporting News. Its selectors are NFL scouts and personnel directors, the same fearless judges of talent who included four players from below-.500 college teams among the 28 first-round picks in the recent draft: California Quarterback Rich Campbell ( Green Bay), Kansas Wide Receiver David Verser ( Cincinnati), Watts ( Oakland) and Auburn Running Back James Brooks ( San Diego).

Why do the All-America teams selected by writers and coaches have no players from losing teams? Hazarding a guess, one NFL personnel chief, the Dallas Cowboys' Gil Brandt, says, "TV teams dominate the All-America squads because that's the way most writers and coaches get a look at players out of their conference or area. And how many losing teams play on TV? Not many."

Brandt and other NFL personnel directors clearly parted company with All-America selectors over Purdue Quarterback Mark Herrmann, who led the Boilermakers to an 8-3 record last season. Though he was a consensus All-America, earning first-team honors from all the teams selected by writers or coaches except the NEA's ( Ohio State's Art Schlichter got the nod on that one), Herrmann was ignored by The Sporting News, which chose Stanford's John El-way, a sophomore. Herrmann was also passed over in the NFL draft until Denver finally selected him in the fourth round, the 99th player taken overall. That put him exactly 93 picks behind the first quarterback selected, Campbell, whose team had a 3-8 record.

HOLD THAT LINE

James Strong, a local cattle rancher, wasn't happy with the way his boy fared last season under James Anderson, the football coach of the Rolla (Mo.) High School Bulldogs. Lance (Boomer) Strong, a 6'1", 205-pound sophomore, played fullback and linebacker on the junior varsity but quit after getting into only two varsity games. The elder Strong, who hopes his son will get a college football scholarship, showed his displeasure by trying unsuccessfully to get Anderson fired. Then he took another tack. Strong's 470-acre ranch is right on the boundary line separating the Rolla School District from the St. James School District, and he's now attempting to get the line redrawn to enable Boomer to attend and play football at the high school in St. James, 10 miles away.

Some townspeople in Rolla feel that Strong should have freedom of choice in the matter of which side of the boundary his ranch lies on. Others disagree, less because of Boomer's football talent—he's considered a good but not spectacular prospect—than because the desired boundary change would mean less real-estate tax revenue for Rolla, more for St. James. Accordingly, after Strong collected the 260 signatures on petitions necessary for placing the question on last month's general election ballot, the boundary shift was rejected by Rolla voters but approved by those in St. James. Because of the split decision, this week the Missouri Board of Education is expected to appoint a three-member arbitration board to resolve the issue. Strong says of the upcoming vote on the boundary-line adjustment, "I will go by the wishes of the majority." As for Boomer, he says that he'll miss his Rolla friends if he winds up playing for the St. James High Tigers, adding, "They'd like for me to stay, but they understand." A surprisingly equable note is also struck by Anderson. "Parents don't always agree with coaches," he says.

FUSE-LETTER

Did you know it can be Clear and Rainey in the Boston Red Sox bullpen at the same time? Well, it can—just the other day, relief pitchers Mark Clear and Chuck Rainey were successively called into action in a stormy 8-4 Bosox loss to Texas (Starter Frank Tanana having long since gone to the showers)—and the coexistence of Chuck and Mark on the same pitching staff was duly noted by Warner Fusselle in a recent issue of his weekly Fuse-Letter. Privately circulated, Fuse-Letter is an informative, sometimes irreverent compendium of baseball oddities, gags and such recondite information as the fact that Tom Seaver's first, 1,000th, 2,000th and 3,000th major league strikeout victims were all first basemen.