A League

Of the 16,700 men who have worn a Major League baseball uniform, 141 were Jewish. Who knew? That's the question Martin Abramowitz pondered four years ago while sitting with his son at the kitchen table, looking at his incomplete collection of baseball cards depicting Jewish players. To his father's lament of the cards that never were, 11-year-old Jacob offered simple advice: "Make your own." With that, Abramowitz began a search that took him from a Chicago basement to dusty courthouse records to document "American Jews in America's Game," a set of baseball cards that goes on sale next week.

Matt Simon knows a little something about football. That's why the Baltimore Ravens running backs coach didn't mind doing some research when seeking a place that would let a taller and bigger kid like his son Aaron play football when he expressed interest a few years ago. Simon checked around and eventually found the Mid-Atlantic Unlimited Youth Football Association, founded by Baltimore's Bill Casagrande and bearing the slogan "Let the big boys play."...

The Laurel Football Association has enrolled in the Maryland Football Association, ending a dispute with the Anne Arundel County recreation department over the falsification of player documents. In January, the county's Department of Recreation and Parks threw the association out of its league. County officials said association board members, coaches, parents and players repeatedly falsified documents over the past two seasons. The county blamed league officials. Laurel appealed the decision to the county Board of Appeals, was rebuffed and filed a second appeal with the recreation department.

From the comfort of his home in Charlottesville, Va., Gene Corrigan has watched the uncivil war between the Atlantic Coast and Big East conferences flare up in recent weeks. Once among the most respected insiders in college athletics, Corrigan has taken on a new role in seeing how this conflict will play out. The former ACC commissioner has been closely monitoring the recent reports that the ACC is considering adding three Big East schools -- Miami, Syracuse and Boston College -- to its current roster of nine.

For young or old, male or female, beginner, expert or experimenter, Howard County offers numerous opportunities to play team and individual sports. This is a list of county facilities and groups catering to amateur athletes. We apply a liberal definition to amateur sports -- broadening that term into just about anything that's competitive and has a score to be kept. Many groups maintain Web sites, but be careful. Run mainly by volunteers, some sites are more functional and up-to-date than others.

MEN'S BASKETBALL, as we reported last winter, is alive and thriving in Howard County. Never been healthier, with the reigning Maryland men's titlist playing here. But Title IX's impact on the sport in girls leagues, schools and colleges notwithstanding, for grown women, there've been no teams, no league, apparently ever, locally. That is about to change, Mark Pendleton, a sports coordinator for the Department of Recreation and Parks, reported last week. The county's first women's basketball league is scheduled to start in early January.

IT'S FUN TO watch the rich and famous air out the laundry in public. Especially when they're two fabulously wealthy institutions dedicated to the very highest academic and community ideals. That's why there was more than a little chuckling and chortling behind the dignified outrage which greeted last week's news that Princeton University had hacked into a Yale University computer. The kids on both sides have been doing this for years. What made this hack particularly delicious is that it was carried out by adults - who presumably should have known better.

EASTON - Virgil Chevalier is thinking that this season he's doing a pretty good impersonation of Roy Hobbs. Like the fictional hero who swung his homemade "Wonderboy" all the way to the big time in The Natural, Chevalier is giving much of the credit for his success to a batch of baseball bats - in this case turned out by an Eastern Shore furniture maker who never played in more than a few neighborhood sandlot games. After bouncing around baseball's minor leagues for seven years, Chevalier, a 28-year-old catcher and outfielder for the Class AA Binghamton, N.Y., Mets, says his first week at the plate with the bats made him look something like the film's mythical ballplayer.

One of the first principles of business is to "find a need and fill it." Bill Casagrande found a need as a youth and now -- as an adult -- he is filling it for others. Unable to play his beloved football until he was a 10th-grader at Parkville High because he was too big for the recreation and Pop Warner leagues, Casagrande decided seven years ago that there was a "void at the grassroots, the lower levels of football." He founded the Mid-Atlantic Unlimited Youth Football Association to prepare rising sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders too big for the "pound leagues" for high school play.

Well, we've reached the end of another NBA season, so it's time to hand out some awards you've heard of and a few you haven't (all unofficial, because this paper didn't receive an official league ballot.) Maurice Podolak Most Valuable Player Award: At midseason, we thought New Jersey point guard Jason Kidd would be the likely winner. San Antonio's Tim Duncan has had a phenomenal second half, Detroit's Jerry Stackhouse has rounded out his game and become an elite player, and the Lakers' Shaquille O'Neal has been, well, Shaquille O'Neal.