SC would like to see the battery of Bob Apodaca and Biff Pocoroba face Buddy Biancalana.

JDub notes that the Jo Dee Messina song “Heads Carolina, Tails California” works just as well — better, perhaps — if you sing “Biff Pocoroba, Bob Apodaca.”

I would add this: The Broadway musical “Oklahoma!” suffers no loss of coherence if you substitute — for every mention of the title state — the surname of Red Sox reliever Hideki Okajima.

JDub again: While it’s not, strictly speaking, a battery, South Carolina and Arkansas on Saturday will feature a quarterback showdown between Chris Smelley and Casey Dick.

And while we’re channeling Larry King: My sister-in-law can’t get over Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon’s uncanny resemblance to Heat Miser, from the 1974 animated Christmas feature, “The Year Without A Santa Claus.”

I married into a family of Red Sox sickos and I’ve written an essay for Time.com to prove it.

Dick Friedman regrets that baseball in the ’70s never got the battery it deserved: Mets pitcher Bob Apodaca and Braves catcher Biff Pocoroba. In addition to sounding like a steam train chugging out of the station — say it loud, over and over, right now — “Apodaca-Pocoroba” has a perfect, alternating, vowel-consonant beauty to it.

For a few glorious moments in history, the Giants had a Black & Decker battery of pitcher Bud Black and catcher Steve Decker, who wore the power tools of ignorance.

And though it’s not strictly a battery, I never miss an opportunity to tell my favorite cricket story, involving the West Indian bowler Michael Holding, the English batsman Peter Willey and the BBC announcer who said, “The bowler’s Holding, the batsman’s Willey.”

My daughters are trick-or-treating as a box of Cheerios and an astronaut, respectively. My default costume was always a bum, back in the day when bums still existed. Or hobo, but that required perfect enunciation when your friends asked, “What are you?” Otherwise, you’d never hear the end of it.

The difference between bum and hobo, near as I can tell, is that the latter carried a bindlestick – that stick, often seen in cartoons of the ‘40s, that had a ball of belongings dangling from the end and was held together by a bandana.

So my mom burnt a cork on the stovetop and rubbed the carbon on my face to simulate filth. I turned my pockets out to convey abject poverty. And just before leaving home, I’d put on one of my dad’s higher-decibel sportcoats, which said – of me and him – fashion is not a priority.

Try wearing that costume today. When asked “What are you supposed to be?”, you’d have to answer “homeless” or “indigent,” after which you would rightly be considered an insensitive monster.

But then all costumes are fraught with problems. My 1-year-old is going as the astronaut – we have a toddler-sized space-shuttle jumpsuit purchased at NASA in Houston. But I’ve already found myself having to explain: Just because she’s an astronaut and she’s wearing a diaper doesn’t mean she’s the astronaut-in-a-diaper who made so many monologues earlier this year.

Sigh.

Philip Bailey, the Earth, Wind & Fire falsetto, sang “God Bless America” during Game 3 of the World Series Saturday night, taking me back to those years — in junior high and high school — when I was African-American, or imagined myself to be, an image largely drawn from television of the time. Picasso had his Blue Period. I had my Black Period. Both lasted three years.

Then as now, my favorite band was EWF — “Earth,” as I still call them — and so I tried without success to find a daishiki in Bloomington, Minn. I carried a boom box whose antenna, like a compass needle, was always pointed north, toward the faint signal of Minneapolis station KMOJ, which sent out The SOS Band’s “Take Your Time” and Lakeside’s “Fantastic Voyage” and Sugarhill Gang’s “Eighth Wonder” to benighted souls in south suburbia.

My best friends and I watched “The White Shadow,” identifying not with coach Ken Reeves but rather — we thought — with South Central L.A. residents Warren Coolidge and Morris Thorpe and Curtis Jackson. We reverse-engineered Jackson’s signature cut-off sweatpants, which we called Curtis Js. They were scissored jaggedly, like an inverted jester’s hat, just above the knee. We wore knit watchcaps in the summertime, in unconscious homage to Dumb Donald and Russell from Fat Albert.

Our junior high basketball jerseys — at Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary — had “B.V.M.” stitched across our chicken chests. And so we called our school “The Buvvum” — it rhymed with “shove ‘em” — as if “The Buvvum” were “The Bronx” or “The Apollo” or some other fabled and fearsome urban redoubt.

To us, “The Buvvum” wasn’t part of Bloomington but a farflung precinct of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn — the setting of Rick Telander’s Heaven is a Playground, a book we found in the public library and read over and over and never returned. I still have it, stamped inside with “Officially Withdrawn from the Hennepin County Public Library” — freed on amnesty day, its six-figure fine forgiven. Years later, Telander signed it to me and I wouldn’t trade it now for a Gutenberg bible.

Our coach at The Buvvum — a student at Normandale Community College who turned us onto Earth in the first place — was a white kid named Jim Thomas. We called him “Jamal.” We were 12.

I had a rubber basketball on which I wrote “World B. Free” in large block letters in ballpoint pen. I carried it everywhere. I dribbled it bald. I dribbled it smooth. Which was the adjective we used to describe everything: Everything was smooth.

We watched “Good Times” and envied the Evans family, impoverished in the projects. To us, it was an aspirational fantasy, like “Dynasty” or “Dallas”, only ours was a dream of downward mobility from a comfortable suburban existence.

My Panasonic boom box was the size of a carry-on suitcase and featured “the miracle of Ambient Sound.” Or so said the commercials, in which Earth appeared singing the products praises in daishikis, which we called “Earth shirts.” I hung that box from the handlebars of my red Schwinn ten-speed and blasted “The Message,” Grandmaster Flash decrying “rats in the front room, roaches in the back, junkies in the alley with a baseball bat” while I pedaled no-handed past bucolic Nine Mile Creek Park with my World B. Free ball in one hand and a sandwich in the other: Bologna on white, with mayonnaise.

Only it wasn’t a basketball I carried –- it was a “rock,” a word we learned in Heaven and then dribbled bald with usage. In the pickup games at the Y we sneaked into, my friends and I were always demanding the rock from baffled 40-year-old white guys on their lunch hour. Sometimes we demanded the pill. Kurtis Blow called it that: “They’re playin’ basketball — the ball, y’all — we love that bas-ket-ball: the pill, the pill, the pill.”

In eighth grade I went to my first concert: Earth, Wind & Fire at the St. Paul Civic Center. Mike McCollow’s dad dropped us off and picked us up in his powder-blue Bonneville Brougham, which we called The Bonnie. All of this came back to me on Saturday night, when Philip Bailey sang “God Bless America” in Denver: The Bonnie, The Buvvum and Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.

The Bible tells us “Heaven and earth shall pass away,” but Heaven and Earth, I have no doubt, will remain with me forever.

On the subject of the best hangover scenes in literature, G.A. sees my hangover scene in Lucky Jim and raises me the hangover scene in Bonfire of the Vanities. G.A. quotes Tom Wolfe — by heart, I’m guessing:

“The telephone blasted Peter Fallow awake inside an egg with the shell peeled away and only the membranous sac holding it intact. Ah! The membranous sac was his head, and the right side of his head was on the pillow, and the yolk was as heavy as mercury, and it rolled like mercury, and it was pressing down on his right temple and his right eye and his right ear. If he tried to get up to answer the telephone, the yolk, the mercury, the poisoned mass, would shift and roll and rupture the sac, and his brains would fall out.”

O.K., G.A. I see your hangover scene in Bonfire and raise you this hangover scene from The Van, by my man Roddy Doyle:

“There was some sort of a riot going on downstairs. He was awake now. His head was killing him. His guts were groaning; he’d be farting all day. The light behind the curtain wasn’t too strong. That was good; they probably wouldn’t be going to Dollymount in the afternoon. He needed a rest. He didn’t want to see Bimbo. He shifted to a cool bit of the bed. That was nice.”

From the hair of the dog to the hair of our leaders: On the subject of bald presidents, John Walters and Dick Friedman have independently arrived at the same conclusion: For politicians, having no hair is better than having facial hair. America, say Walters and Friedman, will have a bald president again before it has a bearded one. Both point out that our last chin-whiskered chief executive was Benjamin Harrison, whose single term ended in 1893. One thing we can all agree on: a bald and bearded candidate is unelectable. You’ve been warned, Kevin Youkilis.

Max McGee died this week. The former Packers wide receiver caught two touchdown passes in the first Super Bowl while playing with a crippling hangover, reason enough to revisit the greatest hangover scene in literature, from the Kingsley Amis classic Lucky Jim:

“Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. . . The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. . . He felt bad.”

I talked to writer, broadcaster and “Win Those Tweezers” host Colin McEnroe the other day about all kinds of things, including a letter I received from President Bush. The podcast of that interview, on WTIC in Hartford, is here.

(In September, I wrote a column for Time magazine about the letter from the President.)

I have an essay in this week’s Time magazine on America’s bias against bald presidents — bad news for Rudolph Giuliani.

This isn’t my first hair piece (as Joe Pepitone once said). Years ago, I was asked to write a packet of material for the “Late Show with David Letterman”. Because it was terrible, the material was never used, and indeed was immediately plowed into landfill — they literally buried my lead — but I can still recall one of its lowlights: The Top Ten Ways Our Nation Would Be Different if the President of the Hair Club For Men was Also the President of the United States:

*Three words — Hair Force One.
*Bald eagle replaced as nation’s symbol by an eagle with a full, healthy, natural-looking head of hair.

(Never mind that our national symbol is the American eagle.)

In the same packet was another Top Ten — Top Ten Least Popular Salad Dressings:

*Mustang Ranch
*Riker’s Island
*Vinaigretzky
*Tangy Cheddar ‘N’ Kevin Bacon Bits

Yeah. I know.

The Time essay is here.

After I alluded to a maraschino cherry in a recent post on baseball names, G.A. wrote to say that he heard a guy on the radio this week refer to a “Marciano cherry,” which — G.A. observes — “adds new potential to Rocky Road ice cream.”

But here’s the thing about baseball names: They are almost inexhaustibly surprising. Turns out, there really is a Marciano cherry, or something very close to it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Baltimore Orioles rookie righthander . . . Rocky Cherry.