Crutches

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Mike Mussina became the first Orioles pitcher to go five innings in yesterday's 3-3 tie with the St. Louis Cardinals, the only run against him coming on a third-inning, opposite-field home run by Mark McGwire. He allowed four hits, walked two and struck out five.Mussina's only serious trouble came in the first inning, when the Cardinals loaded the bases with no outs. But Mussina, whose error started the inning, struck out Brian Jordan and Willie McGee and retired Brian Hunter on a liner to left.

Forgive my absence from these pages, but I recently suffered a dislocated fracture of my ankle while saving a kitten from a speeding car. The bad news is, it required reconstructive surgery and I have to spend the next six weeks on my butt. The good news is, Christina Applegate will be playing me in the Hallmark made-for-TV movie about my heroic self-sacrifice. There is nothing like a broken ankle to help you realize that just about everyone you know has had one. And, like the doctor said after asking me how it happened, broken ankles are boring, but the stories behind them never are. Hence the kitten tale, which I made up. The truth is I slipped on the kitchen floor, but that is too boring to repeat.

A Severn man arrived home early Wednesday to find an intruder on crutches rummaging through the night stand in his bedroom. According to the police account, as the alleged burglar tried to hobble past, Henry E. Rey grabbed one of the crutches, tripping the man, and held him for police.Rey, 47, told police he arrived home about 12: 30 a.m. and found the burglar. Police said they searched the man and found his pockets filled with a dozen necklaces, three rings and nine pairs of earrings taken from the night stand drawer.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Second baseman Roberto Alomar arrived in camp yesterday on crutches, saying that his sprained left ankle has been slow in healing. But if he's going to be injured, this is the best possible time.Alomar went for a magnetic resonance imaging exam late yesterday afternoon, so that team doctors can identify the exact nature of his injury. General manager Pat Gillick said at 8 last night that he hadn't heard the results.However, Alomar expects to be back long before the start of the regular season.

"He swathed himself in quotations -- as a beggar would infold himself in the purple of Emperors." -- Kipling Two roads lead to a reputation for learning and cultivation. The harder is to read a great many worthy books, which is laborious and unfashionable. The easier is to buy an anthology of famous quotations and skim it to garner tags to drop into conversation. For successful bluffing, a comprehensive book of quotations is an indispensable tool. H. L. Mencken wrote in the 1920s that in the United States, "the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive aristocracy."

Gov. Martin O'Malley says he learned a hard lesson last week: He's not 20 anymore. Hoping to add spice to his workout routine, the 44-year-old politician abandoned the elliptical machine in favor of some "high-impact running" on the treadmill, only to develop sharp pain in both knees. The pain in the right one went away, he said, but the left just got worse. A trip to the doctor Thursday confirmed that he had suffered a stress fracture in his left tibia and will be forced to use crutches for four to six weeks, he said.

On land Viki Anders has some trouble getting around. She walks with aid of crutches, the result of foot injury and a subsequent condition called Complex Regional Pain Syndrome. But in the water she swims like a dolphin. Early Sunday a few days shy of her 60th birthday, Anders eased herself into the pool at the McDonogh School and swam the butterfly for 1,500 meters, almost a mile. She did it to raise money for the Johns Hopkins Patient and Family Fund. It assists needy cancer patients and their families with expenses not covered by insurance during their treatment.

Instead of celebrating the Ravens' first playoff win like the rest of his teammates, Kim Herring left the locker room on crutches. The Ravens' strong safety was the biggest casualty yesterday and is questionable for Sunday's game at Tennessee with an ankle injury. He hurt his left ankle on the opening kickoff of the second half, getting his leg tangled with teammate Brad Jackson. "Right now, it's a pretty bad high-ankle sprain," Herring said. "It's basically see how it is Wednesday or Thursday.

Memo to Associates:In benchmarking our company's performance against a peer group since our recent re-engineering, we realize that further rightsizing is in order to achieve the efficiencies needed to return to our core competencies. To ensure that this continues to be a high- performance workplace, we will begin outsourcing our human resources functions and convert other departments into cross-functional teams. A paradigm shift is necessary if we are to remain a learning organization in an era of discontinuous change.