By Heidi Osselaer
Who would be crazy enough to hire a sports commentator who did not know the difference between a box score and a boxcar? Who thought the little cushions on the baseball diamond were there in case a player fell? Lyle Abbott, the city editor of the Arizona Republican newspaper, that’s who. And as it turned out, his hiring of Sally Jacobs, the paper’s society editor, to be a sportswriter was a stroke of pure genius.