*Re: The Phillies nice win over the Mets Friday. Nobody I heard mentioned that Johan Santana - who averages 200 innings a year and over 100 pitches a game - left a 2-2 game after eight innings having thrown 95 pitches, with a lefthander, Ryan Howard, leading off the ninth. The night before, the Phillies let Cole Hamels pitch the ninth of a 4-0 game in Atlanta when he had 105 pitches through eight. I’m telling you, they’re overusing this kid, and they’re going to pay for it….

Give Charlie Manuel credit, though, for using closer Brad Lidge in the ninth Friday - the ninth of a tie game is a better time for your best reliever to be in the game than any save situation.    

*Mike Schmidt said on “Daily News Live” last week, in reference to Ryan Howard, that he was “embarrassed” every time he, Schmidt, struck out. No wonder he was always so grumpy. He whiffed 1,883 times, seventh-most all time, and led the league four times.

*Comcast-Philly has been a persistent source of annoyance lately. Mark Kram is “Daily News Live’s” house dumper on every local athlete who’s down at the moment- in ripping Brett Myers the other day he said the Phillies “weren’t patient enough,” with Gavin Floyd… Come on. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess Kram wasn’t saying that when Floyd was here, getting lit up every time out and looking like at least as big a head-case as Myers….

Later on the same DNL, they brought Dee Lynam on to talk Sixers. So Dick Jerardi starts railing about the NBA’s “soft” salary cap and how dumb and tedious it is and baffling to the fans, using as evidence the fact that the subject has silenced Kram, like that’s a bad thing. The soft cap can be maddening, but Jerardi advocates a simple hard cap… OK, let’s say you have Tim Duncan on your team and his contract runs out and the team is $5 million under the cap and somebody (the Knicks, say) offers Duncan $5 million and five cents. “We’re screwed for the long haul” is real easy for the fans to grasp….

And then there was Mitch Williams on Phillies Post-Game Live the other night, defending Ryan Howard, saying Howard’s batting average doesn’t mean much compared to his slugging percentage. Take Chipper Jones, the Wild Thing said - he’s hitting .390 but only has 17 homers and 14 doubles.

Ryan Howard’s slugging percentage: .471. Chipper’s: .630. …

*Jack Nicklaus became a superduperstar in the late 1960s. From 69 through his 86 Masters win (at age 46), Nicklaus averaged less than 16 tour events per year. After that, of course, he played less. Tiger has averaged over 17 tour events a year for his career. Yet I heard on talk radio today, for the umpteenth time, that Tiger’s killing golf by not playing the tour enough, and somebody ought to do something about it, because Jack was out there every week in his day. For the rank-and-file callers to say this sort of stuff is one thing, but the hosts? It’s not like, with the Internet, the info is hard to find…

*The best thing about the Marlins’ 18-17 loss at Colorado last night - a game the Fish led 13-4 - was that three Florida pitchers were credited with “holds”.

*I’m at the Barnstormers’ game at York- the Revs have Shea Hillenbrand- remember him? He’s been here for three days, and it’s the first live pitching he’s seen since being released by the Dodgers late last season. No, he was not mentioned in the Mitchell Report…. 

*One more thing about York- the press-box food here is catered by the Olive Garden - three pasta dishes tonight, including Veal Parmigana and shrimp, salad and breadsticks. Another grueling Saturday night at work….

The ESPN crew is Stu Scott anchoring, with Jay Bilas, Jeff Van Gundy and Mark Jackson doing analysis from the desk. Stephen A. has his own little talk-show set off to the side. In comparison to TNT this is going to be humorless and, I fear, relatively unbloggable. Unless it goes really well, I’m out after the Sixers pick at 16.

7:14- Andy Katz confirms the obvious: The Bulls have told him they’re taking Derrick Rose No. 1.

7:23- We’re looking at the Bulls’ War Room for the third time - even though there’s nothing happening there. Their pick is made. Everybody’s just sitting around. Are you like me? Had you forgotten that Vinnie Del Negro is actually the Bulls’ coach? How did that happen?

7:39- Rose is chosen. His brothers, who started an AAU team for him and have been known to “negotiate” with his coaches, seem like classic stage parents, so the fact that they don’t seem interested in hogging the camera is small good news. Michael Beasley smiles and claps his way through the losing-Oscar-nomineee shot, with of all people Bob Huggins looking bored (and thirsty?) in the background.

Rose is the correct choice, a phenomenal athlete who’s a real point guard and by all evidence not a jerk. Upside- Jason Kidd plus a 20-plus a game scorer. Downside- Eric Snow.

I hope it’s obvious I’m kidding about Eric Snow.

 7:45- Miami takes Beasley, ending the only real drama of the night. O.J. Mayo isn’t clapping, and looks just short of dour in his expressionlessness.

7:50- Mayo to the T-Wolves. He’s wearing a silky, cream-colored three-piece and multi-colored wing-tips. A little retro, and frankly a little clownish.

7:55- Russell Westbrook to Seattle. Upside- Sidney Montcrief, but that’s a reach. Kevin Durant is in the house, and when the pick is announced he claps and celebrates in that odd, semi-dainty way he has.

8:03- Kevin Love to the Grizz. I loved Love in the middle of the college season, but thought he got exposed against quickness in the Final Four. Potentially nice piece on a good team, but can’t see him making a bad team, like Memphis, good.

The Knicks are up next. The obligatory camera pan of the loony fans in the audience stops on a guy in a Knicks jersey who yawns majestically. Catch the fever.

8:08 - It’s the Italian, Danilo Gallinari. Boooooo.

Fran Frischilla semi-predicts that Gallinari could eventually become a New York sports figure like Derek Jeter and Tiki Barber. Ohhkeeyy…

During his Stephen A. spot, Gallinari seems a little unnerved by the reaction. Might be a language-barrier thing.

8:14- Eric Gordon to the Clippers. He’s the fifth college freshman in the first seven picks. Not crazy about this guy- not really a 2-guard size- and shot selection-wise, and obviously not a point. Very strange outfit- white tuxedo jacket, short with black-and-white shirt and black collar, black pants.  Literally not a suit

With the arguable exception of Westbrook, everybody to this point has made very straightforward, best-player available picks. No trade talk. None of the broadcasters have said anything brilliant, funny or stupid. Just not a lot of meat on this bone. Of course, Larry Brown sticks his toe back in the water in a couple minutes…

8:20- Huggy’s guy, Joe Alexander, to the Bucks. I actually like him. When you’re 6-8-plus, can jump to the rafters and have excellent mid-range shooting skills, you ought to be able to score in any league. 

If the Bobcats don’t take Brook Lopez, he’s headed toward Brady Quinnville.

8:27- D.J. Augustin to Charlotte. I think Augustin has been undervalued, an excellent penetrate-and-dish guy who can also shoot jumpers, but don’t they already have Ray Felton?

Brook Lopez isn’t even trying to hold it in- he has actual tears in his eyes. He almost has to go next, though- New Jersey needs quality size as much as any team in recent memory.

Anyway, Chris Wheeler is driving me nuts. Wheels can be an earnest analyst of the game, but he’s got a narrative in his head about the recent slump as if it’s some mysterious baseball force in the universe, and he’s just pounding it to death, no matter what.

I’m watching them in Oakland right n0w. First inning, the Phils get Jayson Werth and Chase Utley to second and third on a double steal with one no. Burrell hits a fliy to medium-shallow center, and Werth tags and goes. The A’s outfielder makes a strong throw on one hop, but the catcher misses the ball. He lunges immediately forward to make the tag, though, as if he had caught it cleanly. Werth easily and clearly beats the phony tag.

So Wheels goes into this riff about how Werth was “dead meat,” if the catcher had made the catch, and the Phillies have finally caught a break and broken the slump-spell or something.

Groan.

Conservative pundits like Charles Krauthammer and George Will have weighed in of late, predictably, in favor of removing governmental shackals so our good friends the oil companies can drill away, in which case truth, justice and happy fun for all.

From Krauthammer:

“A majority of Americans now favor drilling in the Arctic and offshore. Democrats stand in the way of increased production, just as they did 13 years ago when President Bill Clinton vetoed drilling in ANWR. Domestic oil production would be about 20 percent higher today if the Republican Congress had been allowed to prevail.”

Actually I don’t want to be too hard to Krauthammer, since he is a loud, passionate and longtime advocate of a gas tax recycled back to consumers as rebates or reductions in the payroll tax, which might be the single best domestic policy change possible right now. But the truth is it’s oil companies, not Democrats, who stand in the way of production, and if a majority of Americans knew that their opinion of Arctic drilling would obviously be different.

Consider this report to the House Committee on Natural Resources. You really should read it yourself, but to summarize:

-On the Outer Continental Shelf, 82% of federal natural gas and 79% of federal oil is located in areas that are currently open for leasing.

_ Onshore, 72% of oil and 84% of natural gas resources are either fully accessible under standard lease stipulations designed to protect lands and wildlife, or will be accessible pending the completion of land-use planning or environmental reviews.

_ Between 1999 and 2007, drilling permits for oil and gas development on public lands increased more than 361%.

_ Since 2004, the Bureau of Land Management has issued 28,776 permits to drill on public land; in that same time, only 18,954 wells were actually drilled.

_ Oil and gas companies have stockpiled nearly 10,000 extra permits to drill that they are not using to increase domestic production.

_ Onshore, of the 47.5 million acres of federal lands leased by oil and gas companies, only about 13 million acres are actually producing oil and gas.

_ Offshore, only 10.5 million of the 44 million leased acres are currently producing oil or gas.

_ Combined, oil and gas companies hold leases to nearly 68 million acres of federal land that are not producing oil and gas.

_ The 68 million acres of leased, inactive federal land could produce an additional 4.8 million barrels of oil and 44.7 billion cubic feet of natural gas each day.

_ That would nearly double total U.S. oil production, and increase natural gas production by 75%.

_ 4.8 million barrels of oil equals more than six times the estimated peak production from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

_ Development of and production from the 68 million acres currently under lease but not in production would cut US imports of oil by one third.

In a nutshell: The oil companies - and their minions in the goverment and media - want you to believe gas prices are so high because Democrats and tree-huggers are shackeling them, even though enough land or offshore property is available to double domestic production, and oil companies either can’t or won’t actually drill on that land.

Why? Other than the obvious maximize-profits-by-holding-down-supply theory which has to be simplistic (although it no doubt has some truth) I have no idea.

Ba-zing.

Anyway, some thoughts on what’s been going on in my absence. Let’s see, uh, we’ve been to the moon….

Seriously, the Lakers have been so bad through four Finals games that it not only calls their team into question, but the supposed awesomeness of the entire Western Conference. LA is soft, mentally untough, limited and dysfunctional. Despite the media narrative that led to the MVP award, Kobe remains an awful teammate, but he’s so good a player that everybody on that club has to defer to him, and that’s just a fatal flaw. Are you telling me the West is monstrous when nobody in it could expose that flaw, but a team that needed seven games to subdue the Atlanta Hawks can?

I was planning to do a lengthy Kobe-MJ riff, but ESPN.com’s Bill Simmons emerged from his self indulgent Boston fan ranting to sum it up in five sentences: The Kobe-MJ thing … done. Over. Jordan never would have let that happen in the Finals. Ever. Under any circumstances. Nobody is ever allowed to bring this up again.

I’m at the Big 33 game, which is humming along at about one snap every nine minutes. New wrinkle this year- when either side manages to get 11 players on the field (not 10 or 12) a time-out is called so everyone can savor the accomplishment. There are actually 33 players on each roster- the Big 33 refers to the numbers of time outs each side gets per half. The opening kick was at 7:05 p.m.  It’s 8:33 p.m. and according to the stadium sundial there’s 4:09 left. In the first half.

I remember when you could play a 60-minute high school football game in less than four hours, but of course I’m an old guy.

Or something. 

There were balls and gloves and helmets and Nikes. Then there was the tux and gown, then the cap and gown.

Now, senior high school athletes, it’s time to move on.

A few of you won’t quite be able to, and will seem, in time, like the inspiration for Springsteen’s song “Glory Days,” or Roth’s novel, “Goodbye Columbus.” That is, a sad ex-jock who could peel the uniform off their body but never their soul.

Most of you will get past it, though. Some will soar past it, like an expert hurdler, en route to bigger and better things.

But for all of you, things are about to change. The sociology of high school is cruelly simple, a jock’s place in it prominent and secure. Unless you’re a big-time, Division I apprentice pro, it’ll never be that simple again.

So there are some things you’d do well to forget, and some you’d do well to remember.

Remember the most obnoxious, meddling, counterproductive parent you came in contact with. The parent who, however well-meaning, was part of the problem, not the solution, whatever the problem was. Even if (maybe especially if) that parent was yours.

Think about that parent a little. Bear in mind that there is nothing in life as likely to make people take leave of their senses than delusions of glory about their children. And bear in mind the truism that those who fail to learn history are condemned to repeat it.

Remember getting your picture or something you said or a recounting of something you did in the paper. Then remember not getting recognition when some lesser someone did. This just in: Life isn’t fair.

Remember the first time you really knew, first hand, what the term “giving 100 percent” means. And how it felt when 100 percent wasn’t good enough. And when 100 percent was good enough and 99.99 wouldn’t have been.

Remember getting beat by someone you don’t like, and swallowing your pride and gritting your teeth and shaking that person’s hand. Remember watching that somebody cut down the nets. Think of how that person probably felt watching you celebrate.

At some point in your career, you no doubt felt you’d been robbed by an official, or treated unfairly by a coach. Remember how you handled that and how you might, with the luxury of retrospection, have handled it differently. Might come in handy down the road.

Remember teams and teammates, locker rooms and buses and huddles and nicknames. The moments that, 20 years from now, you and a teammate will get together with cold beverages and laugh about. Remember camaraderie. That’s what retired pro athletes invariably say they miss most.

Forget the hoary notion that sport builds character. As we see daily, it doesn’t. What builds character is having a passion and striving for it with dignity, losing yourself in something without losing who you are.

Sport is no better an avenue for that than art or music or a dozen other things. No worse, but no better.

There’s probably one coach of all coaches with whom you really connected. If it’s viable, stop back and visit him or her once in a while.

There are people who love you because you’re a jock and people who hate you for the same reason. Remember that both groups are badly missing the point.

Remember how to respect and understand and listen to your body. That might be the most valuable lifetime lesson sport can teach.

Remember that unless you’re Tiger Woods, there’s always somebody out there better than you. And you aren’t Tiger Woods.

So — and this is meant in the kindest possible spirit — get over yourself already.

But don’t forget how glorious it was to be part of it. To get ready for and then play in a big game. To be a major piece of the intricate machine that is a team that works.

To perform under the absurd and exhilarating pressure of knowing that everything you’ve worked so hard for comes down to right here, right now. To sit in a locker room, sweaty and spent and knowing that you’ve just had a great season.

I hope that at least once, you did something great in a game or meet or match and the crowd went nuts. I hope your insides did the samba. And I hope that, within that moment, you took a second to stop and drink it all in, how it looked and sounded and felt.

There’s a good chance you intend to play a sport in college. There’s a good chance that once you get to college that’ll change. Maybe you won’t be good enough. Maybe they’re just won’t be time.

As hard as this may be to believe, there’s a very good chance you’ve already played your biggest game, had your most shining athletic moment.

That’s not a bad thing. It’s more than most of us get.

First, problems with the data the map represents:

1. It’s based on 120,000-some responses in a nation of 300-plus million.

2. It’s by county but not population; the “pro-soda” (read: sane) northeast corridor is small geographically but includes New York, Philadelphia and Boston.

3. The chart gives no indication that the research was done in a way that attempted to allow for population demographics (i.e., what if 90 percent of the respondents were college students?). Such allowances go without saying in sophisticated professional polling, and even so such polling is about as accurate as peeing in a tornado, so how much stock are you gonna place in this?

4 . I refuse to believe anyone is addled enough to refer to root beer or Seven-up as “coke.”

Anyway, my college was dominated by the pop crowd, by which you can presume it did not have Ivy League-level admissions requirements. One roommate of mine advanced as evidence of pop’s hegemony the term “soda pop,” in which (his theory went) pop was grammatically the noun and soda therefore merely an adjective.

At the time my answer was little more than screaming into a pillow. But a day later this guy started in again, at a party, overserved, with a girl we were sort of competing for standing between us.

Now I was ready.

“Inside this,” I said, pretending to hold up a Coke can,” is a mixture of chemicals that is called soda. A cola-flavored can of soda is exactly, objectively, inarguably what this is, in the same way that that’s a chair and that’s a sock.

“You are within your rights in calling this ‘pop’ in the same way that you’re within your rights in wearing a leisure suit or nylon stretch pants; you are utterly free, in Amercia, to be a dumb-ass.

“But by calling a sock a sock sweet potato, you haven’t created an argument that the word sock can be an adjective when referring to a sock. You have created an argument for your removal - ideally while straitjacketed - from the mainstream.”

I may have cleaned the language up somewhat.

You can imagine how impressed the girl was with all this. Didn’t care. Sometimes you have to stand up for what’s right.

Two posts down is a reprint of a column I did for the Sunday News’ Living section about my kid and his interest in politics and him so looking forward to voting in the primary. Which reminds me: When we actually did walk down the street to vote, a man and woman passed us going the other way, the woman pushing a baby carriage and the man muttering in disgust about liberals “who’re gonna vote for Obama because they feel guilty.”

We were that obvious?

The National League seems to have caught up with the American for the first time in, what, two decades? The extent to which that’s been true, at least through the season’s first two months and at least in terms of which league has better young players, is reflected in the VORP ratings at Baseball Prospectus.

In addition to driving head-in-the-sand sportswriters nuts, VORP is a complex rating of total player performance. It’s cumulative, not per-game or per-at bat or per anything else.

Anyway, of the top 30 in the majors in VORP as of May 30, just seven, and just one of the top 10, are from the AL. Obviously injuries to guys like A-Rod are a factor, but still. And many of the surprise names near the top, like the Pirates’ Nate McLouth, Cardinals’ Ryan Ludwick, Marlins’ Hanley Ramirez and Braves’ Brian McCann, are NL guys closer to the beginning of their careers than the end.

The top five, just FYI: Lance Berkman, Chipper, Pujols, Chase Utley and Dan Uggla. …

On “The Low Post” a couple weeks back, I picked the Spurs and Pistons to meet in the NBA Finals, so you’ll want to hang on every word of this, but I just can’t see the Lakers losing a series right now.

What’s weird about this is that a year ago, it was a foregone conclusion that Kobe was demanding to be traded (he’s acknowledged that, actually) and that deal was apparently about to happen, probably with the Chicago Bulls. The Lakers wanted Ben Gordon, Luol Deng, Tyrus Thomas and Joakim Noah, but Kobe apparently would have used his no-trade clause to nix that deal, since without those guys the Bulls would have a worse shot to win than the Lakers.

So the negotiations dragged into November, with the season about to start, before the whole thing fell apart. All the uncertainty and turmoil evidently played a role in ruining the Bulls’ season, but, uh, hasn’t seemed to bother the Lakers much. …

Speaking of the NBA, how did it get so far ahead of every other American sport in terms of the quality of broadcasting? Jeff Van Gundy is the latest emerging star, but there’s Charles/Kenny/Ernie in the studio, the legendary duo of Marv Albert and Hubie Brown…

I realize this is entirely subjective, but what’s interesting is to me, almost nobody working the NBA really sucks, certainly not Dick Vitale-level sucking. Mike Wilbon, Tim Legler, Reggie Miller, Greg Anthony, Doug Collins…. seriously, which one of those guys don’t you prefer to Sterling Sharpe or Dan Marino, Emmitt Smith, or ESPN’s confederacy of baseball dunces?

…

Whoa- caught up in journalism there for a few hours. Cole Hamels is getting lit up by the Fish. Just wanted to pop in and point out that Hamels had two starts where he threw, I believe, a combined 237 pitches, and he’s gotten racked twice since. …