Ryne’s day in the sun. Sunday will be a big day for Spokane, and especially for North Central High School, where the baseball field is named after Hall of Fame inductee Ryne Sandberg, a three-sport star for the Indians a quarter-century ago.

That’s one thing to be said for celebrity athletes in the American culture. They instill pride.

Some invest generous amounts of time and treasure in the worthy causes of their home towns. Some don’t. But almost all of them leave memories that hover over the fields and arenas where they played as youngsters, the schools whose uniforms they wore and the towns where they got their first headlines. In the case of Sandberg and his contemporaries — football’s Mark Rypien and basketball’s John Stockton — they formed a marquee triumvirate of incomparable sports notability for a city Spokane’s size.

In 16 major league seasons, Sandberg established himself as the premier second baseman of the era, superb as a hitter and phenomenal as a Gold Glove defensive legend.

Spokane hasn’t seen much of Sandberg since his days at NC, but when he enters the Hall of Fame Sunday in Cooperstown, N.Y., NC and Spokane will be there with him.

Data meltdown. It’s scary to think of what the feds would have wrought had Washington State not been given a seat at the table when planning and implementing the clean-up of Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The Tri-Party Agreement was signed in 1989, and ever since the feds have shown they can’t be trusted.

The latest episode was unearthed by a lawsuit filed by the state in response to the feds’ plan to transport nuclear garbage (transuranic waste) from around the country and store it at Hanford. The soundness and safety of this strategy was justified in a study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy. The state challenged the study, and DOE discovered errors in the section on possible effects on groundwater.

Last Friday, DOE canceled plans to begin shipments and began a review of the study. The chief question is why data in the final report didn’t jibe with information used in computer models predicting effects on water quality. Was it an honest mistake? Did the reports’ authors just make it up?

Whatever the reason, the state’s skepticism has once again been justified.