What is ... overrated?

Thirty games. That's how long a hitting streak has to last for baseball fans to go to DEFCON 3 on the Joe DiMaggio watch.

That's when the multimedia barrage begins, Katie Couric and the rest of mainstream American begin to notice and you start getting those pesky non-baseball questions like whether you prefer Coco Puffs or Rice Krispies. (I'm thinking Coco Crisp would choose the former.)

The 30 plateau must resonate loudly in the public conscience, because Ken Jennings found himself squarely in the limelight this week as he approached -- and passed -- that mark for consecutive Jeopardy! victories. Newspapers are running features of the Utah software engineer on the front page and keeping a daily tally of his winnings. He presented David Letterman's Top 10 list this week, and Baskin-Robbins is giving Jennings a year's worth of free ice cream.

I tuned into Thursday night's broadcast to see what all the fuss is about as he went for consecutive victory No. 32. I wasn't impressed. Jennings won, all right, crushing two guys who wore all the confidence of John Kruk going up to bat against Big Unit. Jennings increased his winnings to $1,050,460. (Not bad, and he didn't even have to eat cockroaches or hang out with Rupert and Boston Rob on a deserted island for a month.)

But after all I had read about Jennings' vast fields of knowledge, I couldn't get over these two slow-pitch softballs he failed to take a swing at:

1) This Yankee is the only Ford in the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame.

2) Beefy Barry Bonds has hit many balls into the "Cove" named for this earlier Giants slugger.

We've heard Bonds referred to by many epithets lately, but I don't believe "beefy" to be one of them.

Superman Jennings, meet your kryptonite: baseball. If they really want to get rid of Jennings, Alex Trebek should arrange the following categories for him: "19th-century switch-hitters" and "Intricacies of the latest Collective Bargaining Agreement."

We need to brush back this Jennings hysteria before it's too late. That is, before anybody starts mentioning his accomplishments in the same breadth as DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak or Eric Gagne's 84 consecutive saves.