Cabbage pitch

When the going gets tough, the tough get cabbage. Korean baseball player Park Myung-hwan found himself in deep kimchi after the Korean Baseball Organization ruled he could no longer store frozen pieces of cabbage in his hat during games, ruling the leafy vegetable an "alien substance" on the baseball field. But cabbage couldn't be less alien in South Korean culture; it's used in the national dish, kimchi.

Mr. Park, a pitcher, was using the frozen cabbage as a cooling agent. The problem started in one game in late June when during two pitches his hat tumbled off his head and frozen cabbage fell to the ground. "What will we do if another team argues that because the cabbage leaf fell just as the pitcher was pitching, the batter got confused?" league rules committee chair Heo Koo-youn told South Korea's Yonhap News Agency. Question: Would the batter be confused because something was falling to the ground off a pitcher, or would the real confusion start when he realized that something was a piece of cabbage?

A Wie bit off her game?

What's a girl to do when she can't seem to find the right level of competition? That's the strange position teen golfing phenom Michelle Wie finds herself in after narrowly losing the right to play in the next Masters golf tournament. The 15-year-old was finally upended in the men's U.S. Amateur Public Links Championship. She won two matches against grown men, but in the quarterfinals she couldn't get past Clay Ogden, a 20-year-old college student who went on to win. She won the female side of the national tournament two years ago at age 13.

If Ms. Wie jumped onto the LPGA golf tour, many suspect she would instantly be the tour's second best player after the celebrated Annika Sorenstam. But Ms. Wie has higher goals, trying to make the cut at a few PGA events. Most recently, at the John Deere Classic in early July, Ms. Wie missed the cut only by two strokes.

Her late meltdowns at John Deere and the Amatuer Public Links Championship have led pundits to question whether Ms. Wie is a choker. Usually that sort of characterization is withheld from rookies, much less 15-year-old girls. And maybe that's Ms. Wie's greatest achievement thus far: To some extent, she's made the pundits forget her age and gender.

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