Beer Pong

AT THIS TIME a year ago, the Phillies' playoff rotation was about as steady as a college kid after several games of beer pong. There was Cliff Lee, true. But after that, things got a little sketchy. Cole Hamels was trying, without noticeable success, to replicate the success he'd had in 2008 when he was voted Most Valuable Player of both the National League Championship Series and the World Series. Joe Blanton and J.A. Happ started, except when they were used in relief. And then there was Pedro Martinez, who was skipped over in Denver because it was too cold and who probably shouldn't have started Game 6 of the World Series.

ARE YOU ready for some beer pong? If you are, the Wild Wild West casino at Bally's Atlantic City is the place to be as the town's first bee- pong facility opens tonight. In case you just got back from an extended trip to Saturn, beer pong is a college-campus and sports-event tailgating staple. It's played on a regulation pingpong table, but no paddles are involved. The object is to toss a pingpong ball into a plastic cup filled with beer on the opponent's side of the table. (The game generally involves 10 cups per side, arranged in a triangular shape.

I REALLY want to thank the Daily News for following up the tragic story of a senseless shooting death at the hands of an immature, power-drinking father of two who couldn't control himself in a fit of rage by printing "The Official Rules of Beer Pong" that followed the story. I'm sure there were some people who were up in the air on the actual rules and are glad they are clear now. Josh Piersol Conshohocken

After they got into a dispute over a beer-pong game, Joseph Jimenez, 24, and Scott Riley, 25, met in a Bridgeport alleyway and Riley made a dare, investigators said. "Shoot me, shoot me," Riley said to Jimenez and a companion. "You guys ain't got the . . . " Jimenez accepted the challenge, police said, and yesterday he was being held without bail at the Montgomery County Correctional Facility on murder and related charges pending a hearing next Monday. The Montgomery County District Attorneys' office gave the following account: Late Friday night, Jimenez and Riley were inside a house in the 100 block of West Second Street playing beer pong, a drinking game in which participants attempt to throw ping-pong balls into cups of beer.

Jimmy Fallon has nothing to sweat about. The latest host of NBC's "Late Night" may have begun his new gig last week looking not unlike the anchor wannabe Albert Brooks played in "Broadcast News," but we know - don't we? - that he's not going anywhere. NBC doesn't make late-night mistakes. And when it does, it rides them out until they stop being mistakes. Fallon, whose first reviews almost had to be better than his predecessor received in 1993, is being measured against a man many consider a comic genius.

MISS CONNECTICUT Outstanding Teen Rachael Ramonas, 17, lists among her pageant-winning accomplishments a benefit she organized for families of victims of a fatal drunk-driving car crash. Now she can pad her resume with hosting a party that resulted in two dozen people being charged with underage drinking. It's not clear whether Rachael, who competed in the Miss America Outstanding Teen pageant in August in Florida, was among those charged. Police are not releasing the teens' names because they are juveniles.

The focus in the hunt for a missing College of New Jersey freshman took a grim turn yesterday - a dormitory trash chute that authorities inspected with a special tethered fiber-optic camera. A day earlier, investigators searched the 10-story building from top to bottom with cadaver-sniffing dogs. Investigators wanted to get a "good look inside the chute" at Wolfe Hall, where John Fiocco Jr., 19, a well-liked graphic-arts major from Sewell, lived on the fourth floor, said Capt.