My friend John Walters has rightly chastised me for neglecting his three favorite Yankees in my previous posting on Great Baseball Names of the 1970s: Oscar Gamble, Celerino Sanchez and the almost unimprovable Mickey Klutts.

So here we go: Oscar Gamble, whose Afro looked like earmuffs under his hat, had the quintessential first name of my ‘70s childhood. In that era, I aspired to the slovenly lifestyle enjoyed by two New York City Oscars — Oscar Madison and Oscar the Grouch — and secretly revered a third Oscar, last name of Goldman, who was the Six Million Dollar Man’s boss. (All of this during a decade in which I and everyone I knew subsisted, more or less exclusively, on Oscar Mayer bologna.)

Celerino Sanchez: His first name sounds like an unappealing canned drink, one you might mix into a Bloody Mary. If Clamato is a hybrid beverage made from clam and tomato, Celerino is a portmanteau of celery and maraschino. This would make Celerino the perfect dinner companion to Beef-a-rino, which Kramer famously fed to his flatulent horse while driving a hansom cab on “Seinfeld.”

Mickey Klutts, of course, is a laboratory-made name for a disappointing Yankee, one you couldn’t possibly top if you tried: Joe DiMaggioaf? Yogi Unberrable? Babe Doof? None can touch the real-life Mickey Klutts.

Which isn’t to say that fiction can’t compete with real life when it comes to baseball names. Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel — though set in the 1940s — was published in 1973, a Golden Age of Baseball Names, which might explain why Roth’s roster for the 1943 Ruppert Mundys was so rich with evocative handles, among them:

Frenchy Astarte (real name Jean-Paul Astarte), Nickname Damur, Hothead Ptah, Jolly Cholly Tuminikar, Deacon Demeter, Bobo Buchis, Rocky Volos, Howie Pollux, Catfish Mertzeger, Chico Mecoatl, Specs Skirnir, Mule Mokos, Swede Gudmund, Ike Tvashtri and the immortal – what better name to end on? – Applejack Terminus.

I couldn’t help but think of the great baseball names of the 1970s when – in a single day this week – a man told me he named his son after former Expo Ellis Valentine and my TV issued the name of ex-Mets pitcher (and current Rockies pitching coach) Bob Apodaca and I saw a new biography of Charles M. Schulz, who created Charlie Brown, who in turn worshiped a baseball player named Joe Shlabotnick.

Valentine, Apodaca, Shlabotnick: Some names ordain their recipients, at birth, as future big-leaguers. Classic baseball names – you know them when you see them – are one part stardust, one part diamond dust.

In the 1970s, your chances of making the big leagues increased tenfold if your name – Manny Mota, Lee Lacy, Leron Lee, Buddy Bell, Bobby Bonds, Milt May, Cesar Cedeno, Dick Drago, Duffy Dyer, Dan Driessen, Dave Duncan, Walt Williams, Clay Carroll and Denny Doyle, just off the top of my head – was alliterative.

These men were blessed at birth, as was every Aurelio of that double-knit decade, not least of all Aurelio Rodriguez, the Tigers third baseman and original A-Rod, whose name I thought – thanks to infrequent utterances on the NBC “Game of the Week” – was “A-Really-Old Rodriguez.” (A-Really-Old Rodriguez was only 26 in 1974, but then I was only 7.)

At least two other Aurelios played in the ’70s – Aurelio Monteagudo and Aurelio (Senor Smoke) Lopez – and both of them were killed in car accidents, as was Aurelio Rodriguez, struck down while walking in Detroit.

Aurelio Rodriguez was central to another bit of baseball arcana: He was, for a time, the only big-leaguer with all five vowels in his first name, while Ed Figueroa was the only one with all five vowels in his last name.

Some last names are touched with magic. I still cannot hear the surname of Bob Apodaca – Appa-dacka! – without hearing the Fozzy Bear catchphrase of that same era: Wocka-wocka!

The surname of Pedro Borbon is, to my mind, a beautiful alloy of “bourbon” and “Sorbonne.” In the name of a single Dominican relief pitcher, there’s Kentucky whiskey and a French university – the lowbrow and the highbrow.

But not the eyebrow. For the eyebrow, we have Andy Etchebarren, who had one continuous valence above the two windows of his eyes – a kind of upside-down eyeblack.

The name Cesar Geronimo stamped its bearer for greatness, smacking as it does of Roman emperor and Apache warrior.

Dick Pole: Even now, it is impossible to say the name without feeling a little like Beavis – or possibly Butthead. Charlie Spikes may be the best baseball name of all time, but the Charlie that more often springs to my mind from the ‘70s is Charlie Sands, an Angels catcher who in turn makes me think of Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger striker. (And indeed, the back of Charlie Sands’ 1974 Topps baseball card has echoes of The Troubles in Northern Ireland: “Charlie had a fractured kneecap in ’69,” it says, with a line drawing of Charlie’s knee emanating cartoon stars of pain.)

Carmen Fanzone was ahead of his time, his surname a website before websites existed.

Bobby Winkles, Rollie Fingers, Boog Powell, Bake McBride, Oscar Gamble, George Mitterwald, Rennie Stennet, Willie Montanez, Manny Sanguillen, Rogelio Moret – all names to love. Paul Casanova, Ellis Valentine, Bobby Valentine – all named for love.

There was beauty, too, in the briefest names of the ‘70s. “Joe Lis” was a pithy telegram that cut right to the point, as was “Ron Cey,” whose name I used to mispronounce as “Key,” probably because that’s what I used for punching out his chad on the All-Star ballot – my father’s car key.

As a very short name for a very short man, “Ron Cey” was nearly impossible to improve on. And yet that was the beauty of baseball names in the 1970s. You could get shorter, in name and stature. Which is to say, you could squat and answer to Ott. Ed Ott.

Though Dan Rather is suing CBS for $70 million over his dismissal as anchor, it’s hard to see how that network’s news division can suffer any further, either in the ratings — in which the CBS Evening News is dead last — or in reputation: The network’s logo is already a black eye.

But for the 75-year-old Rather, the lawsuit — any lawsuit, regardless of its claim — is beneath his stature as an anchorman emeritus. Shakespeare’s Richard II might have been talking of those other seated kings — the Voices of God, network anchormen of a certain era, those real-life Ron Burgundys — when he said: “We are not born to sue, but to command.”

Calumnies rolled off the backs of Cronkite & Co. like hurricane rain off a trenchcoat. (”That’s the way it is” is another way of saying, “Que sera sera.”) But that was another time and we live in another country — Litigation Nation, in which everyone has a suit to press. (Some of which involve pressed suits. Remember the judge who sued his dry cleaner this summer for $65 million?)

Not all of these lawsuits are frivolous, but they often raise more questions about the plaintiff than the defendant. A man is now suing the makers of Brut because he felt his after-shave betrayed him — “Et tu, Brut?” — when he set himself alight near a campfire in Wisconsin.

That suit raises manifold questions, not the least of which are: How much Brut was the man wearing? Why wear any when you’re camping? Or does cheap after-shave repel bugs and bears, the way it does women?

The answer to these (and most of life’s other questions) is provided by Nathan Detroit in “Guys and Dolls”: “Sue me, sue me, shoot bullets through me . . .” Suing someone for Monopoly money, as Rather is doing, is literally a parlor game in America: The slogan of the board game So Sue Me! is “Sue Your Friends. Take Their Stuff.” (Sample lawsuit: “You put up the Do Not Disturb Sign. So why are you still disturbed?”)

Nebraska state senator Ernie Chambers was recently inspired to serve God — with papers — when he filed suit against the Almighty for perpetrating “fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes, pestilential plagues, ferocious famines [and] devastating droughts.” (And abominable alliteration.)

Chambers filed the frivolous suit as a protest against frivolous suits, which is a little like spanking your child for hitting a friend.

God has so far declined comment through his counsel, the New York firm of Gold, Frankensence & Myrrh, but He’s been through this before, most recently in the 2001 Billy Connolly movie “The Man Who Sued God,” about a fisherman whose boat is destroyed by an act of God.

The deep-pocketed deity might well have been named as a co-defendant in a current case in Australia, where a lesbian couple is suing their obstetrician because they got two babies by in vitro fertilization when they only ordered one. (Apparently, they weren’t delighted by the surprise, as when you find that miraculous third peanut in the shell while shucking nuts at a baseball game.)

The point is, some lawsuits — regardless of legal merit — just don’t smell right, no matter how much Brut they’re wearing. Paris Hilton is suing Hallmark for using her likeness on a greeting card? (The last thing the reclusive heiress wants is publicity.) John Travolta has sued the owners of the runway in his private, fly-in Florida community because he can’t land his Boeing 707 there? (A true inconvenience, or the whole point of “An Inconvenient Truth”?)

A gambler sued by Caesar’s Indiana Hotel & Casino for failing to repay $125,000 in loans has countersued the casino for extending her credit and comps when they should have known she was a problem gambler. In doing so, the woman has ignored an ancient, Biblical prescriptive: Render unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s.

Which brings us back to that other bethroned authority, Rather, who is — or ought to be — bigger than the common lawsuit. He could learn from other colossi, from Richard II to the robber barons, who knew that legal vindication was less satisfying than sheer vindictiveness. “You have undertaken to cheat me,” Cornelius Vanderbilt wrote to former business colleagues more than a century ago. “I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you.”

Those were the days.

The other night I phoned my father — 1,300 miles away in Minneapolis — and he casually mentioned five minutes into our conversation that the Twins were beating the Royals 3-0 in the 7th. “It’s a meaningless game,” he acknowledged, “but there’s nothing else on.”

We spoke for ten more minutes about other things, and when I finally hung up the phone I saw on the ESPN ticker that the Twins had lost 9-5 to Kansas City. So I called my dad back and asked him how the Twins could possibly be up 3-0 when their game was evidently over and they had in fact lost. He replied, “They lost the first game of a doubleheader. I’m watching the second game. And now the Twins are up 5-0 in the eighth.”

Fair enough. But when I hung up the phone for the second time, the ticker said, to my astonishment, that Scott Baker of the Twins was throwing a perfect game through eight innings. So I called my dad back and said, “In two separate conversations about the ‘meaningless’ Twins game you’re watching, you didn’t think to mention that Baker is throwing a perfect game?”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line, after which my 73-year-old father — alone in his condo, half a continent away, sounding like a chastened child — said: “I didn’t want to jinx it.”

Word Acre is a little plot of cyberspace – 4,840 yards square – that will serve as a kind of virtual backyard, a playground existing exclusively for fun and games. Which is appropriate, as Word Acre is also an anagram of Rod Carew, whose legend — born on a train in Panama, flirted with .400 over the summer of ‘77, name-checked by the Beastie Boys on “Ill Communication” — dominated my actual backyard for the better part of a decade.

That summer, if you were a right-handed 9-year-old posing in front of a chrome toaster — lunchmeat wadded into your left cheek in lieu of Red Man tobacco, a mop handle held delicately between two oven-mitt stand-ins for his signature red batting gloves — you could literally mirror Carew’s left-handed stance. But you could never replicate his brilliance.  “Carew doesn’t make hits,” wrote Jim Murray, whose week-old Los Angeles Times columns my father would bring home from business trips, “he composes them.”

Murray writing about Carew was like DaVinci’s self-portrait — genius sketching genius — and it’s the rare athlete who can spark a child’s interest not only in sports but in writing.

And it wasn’t just me. One night this month, as the Beastie Boys sang “Sure Shot” on the Summerstage in Central Park, Mike D rapped: “I got more action than my man John Woo and I’ve got mad hits like I was Rod Carew.”

In response, a fan held up a sign that read, “Rod Carew Begs to Differ.” He turned it over, revealing: “3,053 Hits.”

This space doesn’t aspire to get mad hits like Rod Carew, though that is the beauty of the internet: With even just a few hits, words sown on a single acre can be scattered across the world. There are multitudes in an acre, which is why thought of his own death and burial made Samuel Beckett smile.

“Just under the surface I shall be,” he wrote, “all together at first, then separate, and drift through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms . . .”