Baseball icon Casey Stengel was asked for a comment after several of his New York Yankee stars had been caught in an embarrassing scrape in the wee hours of a morning. Said Stengel: “I keep tellin’ these guys that lots of things happen after 1 a.m. and most of them ain’t good. You could look it up.”

You can. And it doesn’t just involve athletes like Stengel’s renegades or Kansas basketball player J.R. Giddens and some of his associates recently at the Moon Bar in Lawrence. All you have to do is read the paper and listen to television reports, particularly in larger cities.

You can’t count – even using your fingers and toes – the times in recent weeks that fights, shootings, mob violence and vandalism occurred after 1 a.m. somewhere, more like 3 or 4 in the morning. Lawrence has had its share of rumbles. But while the Giddens case was a higher-profile event, our town has more such “frolics” than most realize. It is surprising how many under-age people are involved, and how they scoff at the mere suggestion they get home earlier.

Drive-by shootings occur regularly in Kansas City in the wee hours. Crowds gather outside taverns and music venues and mill around until somebody upsets somebody else, and fists, knives and guns are brought into play. People working in convenience stores are often confronted in the early morning hours.

Think of the many injurious and fatal motor vehicle accidents that occur due to substance abuse and excessive speed – often soon after bars have closed and irresponsible individuals have slithered behind steering wheels.

The sad thing is that many, many people have to be out after midnight because of their jobs or family obligations and cannot avoid the hazards posed by others. Consider the law-abiding citizens who have died or been maimed even though they have been tending to business, because of drunken counterparts on streets and roads.

But a good rule of thumb continues to be to get out of general circulation by midnight or as soon after that as possible. Few bar brawls occur in private homes if people are in bed.

As Casey Stengel put it so well: You could look it up.