For Expos, look to another locale outside the States

Now that baseball's labor agreement is in place, the question Major League Baseball must answer is: Will the Montreal Expos stay in place? Or be moved by baseball, which owns and operates the money-losing franchise? With more rumored movements than Beethoven ever wrote being considered, several forwarding addresses have been mentioned, with the likeliest place for the Expos to be delivered F.O.B. being the Washington, D.C., area. Baseball, however, doesn't want to face a lawsuit by Orioles owner Peter Angelos over territorial rights, Angelos seeming to win more in court than on the field. So, other forwarding addresses are being considered, including Portland, Buffalo, Charlotte and San Juan, Puerto Rico. San Juan? Yes, says Lawrence Rocco of the Newark Star-Ledger, who believes "the Puerto Rico possibility is the most intriguing. When the Rangers and Blue Jays played there last season, it was a wild success. Baseball is destined to expand more internationally, and this would be a great free look at that possibility." In the meantime, baseball's version of the homeless will continue to play in Montreal ... at least for another year.

IRON MIKE'S NOT SEEN A ROUND: Mike Tyson has been MIA since losing to Lennox Lewis in June. His only sightings have been on "The Best Damn Sports Show Period" and in a commercial promoting the show showing the "I Want to Eat Your Children" boxer baby-sitting an infant for the show's co-host, John Kruk, in an attempt to get on the program. As the New York Post notes, the commercial has been pulled by Fox Sports Net, with a spokesperson for the network stating the obvious: "The ad potentially could have crossed the line." And the New York Observer reports that the "deeply-in-debt Mr. Tyson was unable to muster a winning bid [of $12 million] on a lavishly-detailed Upper East Side townhouse he had bid on at the beginning of the summer." In fact, the owner of the townhouse told the Observer, "Ever since he lost the fight to Lewis, I never heard back from him."

VOL-UPTOUS? For some women, lipstick is a device to make every kiss tell — although, for others it may be like putting spotlights on a landfill to lure prospective home buyers. Now there's another reason for women to cosmetically oversaturate their lips: a new lipstick called "Sports Paint" marketed for University of Tennessee women by a local cosmetic-shop owner so that Volunteer fans can show their true colors. Writes Dwight Perry in The Seattle Times: "The concept isn't entirely original. ... Oregon State fans have been wearing black-and-orange lipstick for years, but the big drawback has been that stores in Corvallis don't stock it until Halloween."

NO PRESENTS FOR THE ABSENTS: "How bad?" are things going for the Florida Marlins? So bad that they can't even give away "free gifts" — which is a redundancy. Seems the Marlins had ordered some 60,000 bobblehead dolls bearing the likeness of team members Julian Tavarez, Brad Penny, Josh Beckett and A.J. Burnett, and Marlins fans, showing no gift of grab, failed to show up in record numbers (or came posing as empty seats) and left the Marlins with more than 22,000 of their original stock.

LINE OF THE WEEK: Rick Morrissey of the Chicago Tribune, on the National Council of Women's Organizations' campaign to admit a female member to Augusta National: "They can burn their bras and brassies all they want, but the Augusta National's chairman isn't going to let the fairer sex in as members. No sir. The only woman who gets to play there is Big Bertha."