Her ‘Good Years’ Are Also Gone

Marge Schott must remember Adolf Hitler from the good years, when he would phone the Cincinnati radio call-in shows, dying to know how the Reds made out.

Everybody called him Adolf “Designated” Hitler back then, which made him laugh and laugh, even though the DH hadn’t been introduced to baseball yet. The guy was always ahead of his time that way.

It’s all there in the new book, “Hitler: The Good Years” (on sale at Riverfront Stadium and wherever pro-Nazi literature is sold).

Yes, in those early years, Adolf was such a scamp.

He would disguise his voice, identifying himself to the Cincinnati talk-shows as “Dolf from Dayton.”

He would make the same, lame joke every spring, about coming to Florida for “mein training camp.”

And he was always pronouncing it “Zinzinnati,” because he thought that was funny. He would say: “I zink Zinzinnati vill vin.”

And everybody would laugh, but behind his back, they hoped that he would get shot with a million bullets, so they could spit on his grave.

Marge obviously meant that Hitler, the early, funny Hitler.

She remembers how proud he was, that week when Johnny VanderMeer pitched those two no-hitters.

Then how crushed he was, when he found out that VanderMeer was actually Dutch.

Marge Schott was a wee lass of 14 in 1933, when Field Marshal von Hindenburg kicked der bucket and Hitler was elected to take his place, which is when he really began to, you know, “go too far.”

Her memory is a little fuzzy, though, although Marge does seem to recall the German chancellor wearing a swastika patch on one sleeve and a Redlegs patch on the other (the one with the smiley face on the baseball).

“Everybody knew he was good in the beginning,” Schottzie said the other day, in a rare up-close-and-personal interview with baseball’s queen of diamonds.

She was explaining why keeping a Nazi souvenir at home was as natural as, gee whiz, hanging a pennant on a bedroom wall.

If only Sotheby’s would hold a big “Adolf H auction,” maybe Marge could make a bid for his golf clubs.

Well, needless to say, outrage spread like wildfire after the rhubarb involving this month’s winner of the Marlon Brando Sensitivity Award.

Ken Jacobson, an official from the Anti-Defamation League, referred to Schott’s comments as “profoundly ignorant,” an oxymoron that fits her every bit as comfortably as “baseball management.”

Phil Baum from the American Jewish Congress added “crude” and “thoughtless,” which, Phil, if I am not mistaken, are already embossed on Marge’s business cards.

From the estimable Simon Wiesenthal center’s international headquarters in Los Angeles, a letter was dispatched by Rabbi Marvin Hier and Rabbi Abraham Cooper to all of baseball’s team owners, reading in part:

“The time has come . . . to do something about Marge Schott. For a person who displays such bigotry and insensitivity to own a baseball team degrades America’s national pastime.”

To which, may I humbly add, amen.

As for those fellow owners, well, the fellows weren’t sure what to make of Marge this time, although Peter Angelos of the Baltimore Orioles was quoted: “She’s a pretty good gal, just a little confused. I wouldn’t take what she says literally.”

I think he means she’s nutsy, not a Nazi.

Schott is more dotty than dangerous, yes. I generally picture her on Golden Pond, calling out to the lake: “The loons! The loons!”

It isn’t as if she is planning a Third Reich Appreciation Night at the ballpark.

However, her stature as an employer of men and women, as well as that of a baseball dignitary and civic leader, make Marge’s ramblings irresponsible bordering on aberrational. The woman is a few innings short of a regulation game, if you get my drift.

This is why the game suspended her for the 1993 season and required Schott to take sensitivity training, a course that evidently was taught by Pat Buchanan.

Marge apologized. Marge makes apologies as regularly as Tony Gwynn makes singles.

But her hometown paper, the Cincinnati Enquirer, is calling for her resignation or removal as owner of the Reds. Enquirer minds are fed up. Ignorance is her excuse, which is no excuse.

Baseball’s rule book has no rule that an owner can’t be a crackpot. Otherwise, the Yankees would have violated it many times.

But nutty old Marge is an embarrassment, in a sport that should be beyond embarrassment by now, but isn’t. Sell the team, lady. Please. Danke schoen.