Davey Johnson, the only person to manage for Marge Schott and Peter Angelos, will manage Team USA in the World Baseball Classic next month, but before getting to that assignment he had some other business to attend to.

“I’m here with our daughter, who had twins about five weeks ago, a boy and a girl,” Johnson said last week, talking by telephone from Winter Park, Fla. “I’m the yard man, the maid, the cook, the washer. I try to avoid feeding the babies with a bottle because that’s how I hurt my back with the Orioles.”

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If this is too much inside baseball, I apologize, but I am too devastated and outraged to write anything else at the moment. Major League Baseball, which can’t kill steroids, has killed the Red Book and the Green Book.

Baseball officials would say the books died of atrophy. No one was using them any more. But I used them, often on a daily basis. They sit on a shelf an arm’s length away from my desk. I can get them that quickly when I need information from them.

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The Red Sox have joined the growing number of clubs that want to establish a payroll cap. Will the Yankees be next in line?

All right, the Yankees aren’t about to call for a cap. But the fact that the Red Sox owners say a cap is needed is almost as funny as it would be if the Yankees did join the cap crowd.

When owners of teams like the Pirates and the Brewers call for a cap, it’s understandable because their payrolls are dwarfed by the payrolls of teams like the Yankees, the Mets and the Red Sox. But the Red Sox? A cynic might say the Red Sox want a cap to save themselves from themselves. They’re like a serial killer who keeps killing because he wants to be caught.

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