Gary Sheffield belts league benchmark

The Tigers’ Gary Sheffield has hit the Major Leagues’ 250,000th home run. The score, which totaled the number of homers by all players since the establishment of the pros, occurred during a Monday Detroit win against the Athletics. Sheffield’s grand slam, his second homer of the game, also leaves him just four shy of 500 career home runs. Starting with the National League, the first homer recorded occurred on May 2, 1876.

Golfer wins water war with 129,000 gallons per month

How huge would a crib have to be to use 129,000 gallons of water a month? Tiger Woods knows. The Orlando Sentinel reports that while an average home uses 10,000 gallons monthly, Woods’ house on Jupiter Island near Palm Beach soaks up over 10 times the norm. Fellow Floridian athletes Grant Hill and Dwight Howard put out eye-popping numbers, too: Hill reportedly used 263,000 gallons in May alone, Howard, 189,000 gallons in July. Sounds like plenty of pool parties or lots of toilet flushing – or maybe both.

Measles vaccine doesn’t cause autism, experts say.  The measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes neither autism nor gastrointestinal disorders, a study found Tuesday, disputing a theory that has persisted for a decade. The theory began in 1998, when British researcher Andrew Wakefield published studies that suggested the measles vaccine caused gastrointestinal problems and that those GI problems led to autism. Co-author W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University in New York said Wakefield theorized that the virus used in the vaccine grew in the intestinal tract, leading to inflammation that seeped from the bowel into the blood and affected the nervous system, causing autism. In Wednesday’s study, the researchers replicated key parts of Wakefield’s original study and determined that the vaccine neither causes autism or GI problems, said Mady Hornig, a study co-author. Irish pathologist John O’Leary, who co-authored the original study. He and the other researchers looked for evidence of the measles vaccine in children’s intestines after they had been vaccinated and sought to determine if their GI problems and autism symptoms occurred before or after they were vaccinated. After studying 38 children, they found that only one child had trace amounts of the measles virus.

Vital Signs: Basketball star Grant Hill is on a mission to protect you from the flesh-eating bacteria known as MRSA. Why? Vital Signs has the details of his personal experience with the disease.

ESPN.com columnist apologizes after race reference

ESPN.com’s Jemele Hill has apologized to the NBA champs, their fans and his readers for a recent column in which she wrote that pulling “for the Celtics is like saying Hitler was a victim.” Huh? “It’s like hoping Gorbachev would get to the blinking red button before Reagan,” Hill continued. Not much is clear from Hill’s comparison between a predominantly Black NBA squad and a racist Nazi leader, let alone her communist metaphor, but the damage was clearly done. Hill e-mails: “I deeply regret the comment I made in a column Saturday. In expressing my passion for the NBA and my hometown of Detroit , I showed very poor judgment in the words that I used. I pride myself on an understanding of, and appreciation for, diversity – and there is no excuse for the appalling lack of sensitivity in my comments. It in no way reflects the person I am. I apologize to all of my readers and I thank them for holding me accountable. This has been an important lesson for me and illustrates that, like many people, I still have a lot of growing and learning to do.” Hill has been temporarily suspended.