If you’re as big on bunting as I am, seeing Juan Pierre pop a bunt over the third baseman’s head for a hit has to be the highlight of the week. Pierre’s hit against the New York Yankees, though, was only one of four bunts that grabbed my attention last week. It was definitely a good week for bunting, sadly a lost art in today’s homer-happy game.

If Phil Rizzuto, the Yankees’ Hall of Fame shortstop, were alive, he would rejoice alongside me because as a player he was baseball’s master at bunting and in retirement its most ardent advocate.

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Lou Brock and Rick Sutcliffe blossomed probably more brightly than any other players after they were traded at the in-season trading deadline. Cory Lidle died. Literally.

The Philadelphia Phillies traded Lidle, a 34-year-old right-handed pitcher, to the New York Yankees July 30, 2006 with Bobby Abreu for four minor leaguers. Ten weeks later, after the Yankees lost their division series of the playoffs with Detroit, Lidle was killed when his single-engine plane crashed into a Manhattan apartment building.

Brock and Sutcliffe lived to tell better stories about their post-trade experiences.

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Under the law, a dead man cannot be defamed. The New York Post nevertheless defamed the late Barry Halper last week.

In a journalistically indefensible page one article, the Post accused Halper of swindling buyers of items from his vast memorabilia collection by passing off uniform shirts, baseballs, historical documents and other artifacts as authentic when they were really fakes.

What the Post didn’t tell its readers was the background of one of the two writers whose names appeared on the story. Peter Nash, a self-proclaimed collector himself.

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