George Thorogood has baseball options

As some Las Vegans don't even know, we have a baseball team, the Las Vegas 51s, which provides fun times at Cashman Field, and which serves as a Triple-A minor league feeder for the New York Mets.

As it happens, a humongous Mets fan is in town this weekend: George Thorogood. He and his band the Destroyers rock the Sunset Station Outdoor Amphitheater on Saturday ($28-$68).

"What kind of water are those rookies drinking" at Cashman? he asked me. "You send them to the Mets, and they start pitching shutouts and getting base hits."

Being a Mets fan qualifies him as a "lunatic," he joked.

"I do a lot of exercising and taking care of myself so I make it through the night of a Mets game without having a heart attack or a nervous breakdown.

"Then I throw down a long, West Coast, American League game to calm down," he said. "I'm especially fond of the Seattle Mariners — a very serene comedown after the intensity of the East Coast."

What's the most memorable Mets moment of his life? Oh, just when Mookie Wilson grounded the unlikeliest roller of all time past the Red Sox's Bill Buckner to help the Mets come back to win the 1986 World Series.

"I don't like to cast aspersions, but when the ball went through Buckner's legs, that was a moment, haha," he said.

But Thorogood's kind of got Buckner's back.

"Bill Buckner came out on opening day to throw out the first pitch, and he was going to throw it to Dwight Evans, a couple of years ago. And some idiot held a sign up there (which read), 'We forgive you, Bill Buckner.'

"What, was the guy a criminal? That's what you say to Nixon after he got impeached," Thorogood said. "That's how far sports people go, sometimes."

He joked the Red Sox must have gone through therapy since then, in addition to winning a few World Series.

"They have a guy starting in center field for them, this year, whose name is Mookie. That's stones," he said, and of course, by "stones," he meant guts.

Thorogood gave me lots of solicited opinions about dumb stadium names; how baseball needs a penalty box for fighters ("There's not enough baseball players, and too many jocks"); Pete Rose; and players who took steroids.

So I asked why he doesn't announce baseball games. He gave me a rock star punch line.

"If you go in a room, and there's 40 women in the room, and they're between 35 and 55, and there's a guy who's a baseball announcer, a guy who's a writer and a guy who's a rock star, who are women going to go talk to? You got that? Haha. They're not gonna crowd around Bobby Costas. Mick Jagger can't even walk down the street, you know what I'm saying?"