> The game was as dull as office picnic softball until the San Francisco Giants’ Willie (“Say Hey”) Mays tripled mightily in the eighth to drive home the winning run, give the National League a 5-4 victory over the American League in the 1959 All-Star game at Pittsburgh.
> With his Mexican countrymen whooping in the stands, tough José Becerra, 23, slugged toe to toe with France’s bull-necked Alphonse Halimi, 27, finally cornered his man on the ropes in the eighth round and knocked him out at Los Angeles’ new Memorial Sports Arena, to win the world’s bantamweight championship in one of the year’s best fights. Shrugged Ex-Champ Halimi: “I thought I could knock heem out—but poof!”
> Floundering in seventh place, the Cincinnati Reds fired luckless Manager Mayo Smith (who was sacked in mid-1958 as manager of the Philadelphia Phillies), then hired Smith’s partner in a Lake Worth, Fla. bowling alley: former St. Louis Manager Freddy Hutchinson (1956-58), who became the team’s eighth field boss since 1947.
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