Scrivener.net

Talk about inviting a baseball curse...

The co-owner with the late, great Mickey Mantle of Mickey Mantle's restaurant in Manhattan put up a sign changing its name to Ted Williams' after the Red Sox beat the Yankees in the playoffs.

Curses followed immediately...

A steady barrage of furious phone calls and threats of death and destruction from fuming Yankee fans helped convince [Bill] Liederman to send the briefly resurrected Splendid Splinter back to his liquid-nitrogen vat in Arizona.

"Unbelievable," is how Liederman described the response to his "tongue in cheek" decision to rename the eatery in honor of the Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer for the duration of the World Series.

"It was all in the spirit of fun and games and good sportsmanship, but you'd think I had started World War III," said Liederman. "I would have left the sign up, but honestly I'm the father of four children ... and the nature of some of these calls was so vitriolic, it was not worth it," he said. "Everybody's got to stop and take a deep breath — it's just a restaurant."

To him perhaps, but not to Mantle's "shocked and outraged" family. "I called our attorney first thing," the late Mick's son Danny told The Post ...