Bunch

SAN FRANCISCO - Chase Utley found serenity here, at a baseball diamond named for a coach who accepted a $1 salary for 16 years to save his college's team from abolishment. Dante Benedetti Diamond is squeezed into the corner of a sleepy neighborhood at the edge of the University of San Francisco's campus. Large black netting prevents home run balls from littering Golden Gate Avenue. Two freshman dorms overlook the field from behind home plate. An undergraduate student stuck a cardboard cutout of Mitt Romney in the window, so the smiling politician is always watching baseball.

One in a series of articles getting you ready for the U.S. Open at Merion Golf Club, June 13-16. THE UNITED STATES Golf Association will conduct 15 national championships or team events this year. Only one of them is a money-maker. That, of course, would be the U.S. Open, which is returning to Merion next month after a 32-year absence. So the organization's marquee competition obviously needs to produce enough revenue to support everything else that the game's governing body in this country has to get done.

It is not uncommon to wind up with multiple 401(k)s after switching jobs a few times during the course of a career. Companies usually allow employees to leave their money in the plans even after they leave the company, although non-employees are not allowed to make contributions. But many financial advisers say it could be better to combine old company retirement accounts into a single 401(k) offered by a current employer or roll all of the old accounts into an IRA. "We actually see this quite a bit," said Dawna Kopko, a senior investment adviser at PNC Wealth Management, Downtown.

MIAMI - The Phillies know they will be without their starting catcher for approximately a month. They are less certain about their slugging cleanup hitter. Both Carlos Ruiz and Ryan Howard underwent MRI examinations Monday in Philadelphia, and the news was not welcoming for the Phillies. Ruiz will miss three to four weeks with a right hamstring strain. Howard received a cortisone injection Sunday for inflammation in his left knee. His examination was troubling. For now, the team is labeling him "day-to-day.

SO FAR THIS WEEK, President Obama has been called potentially "worse than Nixon" on freedom of the press issues, been accused of running an administration guilty of "outrageous, totally inexcusable" conduct, and has endured calls for the proverbial head of his handpicked attorney general, Eric Holder. Rush Limbaugh's at it again? Not exactly. During arguably the worst news cycle of his 52 months in the Oval Office, Obama suffered those verbal broadsides from liberal commentators and journalists such as the lawyer in the 1971 Pentagon Papers leak case and from Carl Bernstein, the reporter who helped break open Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal.

For three Main Line high school students, the night was already bad. And it was about to get worse. It was a quarter to midnight. They were standing in a North Jersey swamp, listening to owl calls. In 15 minutes, a rigorous statewide birding competition would begin. They would spend the next 24 hours crisscrossing New Jersey, looking - and listening - for every bird they could find. Suddenly, it began to rain. Five minutes later, the birds that they intended to tally stopped singing.

THE PAGAN stationed on a corner of Atlantic Avenue in Wildwood stood with his burly arms crossed over his belly, guarding the infamous motorcycle club's hotel-turned-fortress like a living, breathing gargoyle. Behind him, yellow caution tape and blue tarps draped the Binns Motor Inn - a signal from the Pagan's Motorcycle Club for "citizens" and nosy cops to keep out during the 2011 Roar to the Shore biker rally this month. It's the same hotel where federal prosecutors say that leaders of the Pagan's Long Island chapter at last year's rally told their minions to prepare for death or prison as they plotted a hand-grenade attack on the rival Hells Angels.

Forty games in, here's all we know about the Phillies for sure: They are flawed, but not finished. Sure, they can be infuriating. Twenty-two times in their first 40 games they scored three or fewer runs. In 16 of those games, they scored fewer than two. They have been blanked five times. There are days when you wonder whether manager Charlie Manuel is throwing out a lineup filled with eight-hole hitters. The biggest question coming out of spring training was the right arm of Roy Halladay, and that's one of the few conclusive answers the Phillies have received.

George Reiger's small world has gotten bigger. Once a lonely postal worker known as the "Disney Tattoo Guy" for the 2,200 Disney images inked on his body, he is selling his 5,000-piece Disney collection and getting rid of the body art so that he can be with his very own Disney princess. "The Disney Tattoo Guy is dead," said Reiger, who lives in a 6,000-square-foot Mickey Mouse-themed house in Bethlehem, Pa., with custom-designed doors, ceilings, knobs, and fixtures. The enormous collection, one of the biggest in the country, is going on the auction block Monday at William H. Bunch gallery in Chadds Ford.

RE SHANNON Bellamy's story of the unfortunate events between her and her pastor, I'd like to say: "It takes two to tango. " It's a sad day when you have a pastor whom you come to for spiritual guidance who lets you down. He deserves whatever God has in store for him. But just as there is a punishment for him, let us not forget that this so-called victim has a punishment of her own to deal with. Sin is sin. It doesn't matter if we're a pastor or a member of the congregation.