Between their second and third consecutive World Series championships in the early 1970s, the Oakland Athletics took a winter break and engaged in intramural economic warfare. Nine of their players, headed by Reggie Jackson, took the team’s irascible owner, Charles O. Finley, to salary arbitration.

Later that year, 1974, Jim (Catfish) Hunter, the team’s top pitcher, would take Finley before another arbitrator and be declared a free agent because Finley had breached his contract, but this arbitration business was strictly about the players’ salaries. The procedure had been negotiated the year before in bargaining between the owners and the players and represented the first time the players would have a say in what their salaries should be.

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The word is multitasking. It is such a relatively new word that it doesn’t appear in my dictionary, the third edition (1992) of the American Heritage Dictionary. A nice lady at Houghton Mifflin, the publisher, told me multitasking first appeared in the fourth edition published in 2000. She was also kind enough to read the definition: “The concurrent operation by one central processing unit of two or more processes.”

In other words, doing more than one thing at a time. Now that I think of it my oldest child was multitasking when he was in fourth grade. His teacher said she spotted him reading a comic book tucked between the pages of the book the class was reading. She did not reprimand him, though, she said, because he was able to keep up with the class work. He was multitasking.

Mrs. Van der Hayden would not have caught the Mets multitasking. They obviously don’t know how to. They are incapable of performing more than one task at a time.

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Before Peyton Manning, there was Ted Beard. Well, Manning and Beard don’t quite occupy the same plateau in Indianapolis sports history, but before Manning, long before Manning, before professional football came to Indianapolis, Beard was a celebrated professional athlete there.

He was an outfielder for the Indianapolis Indians, an AAA minor league team, playing there before, during and after he played in the major leagues for parts of seven seasons (1948-58), mostly with Pittsburgh, and hit.198 in 194 games.

At Indianapolis, though, he was a star.

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