CABIMAS, Venezuela (AP) – Cesar Gutierrez, a Venezuelan shortstop who set a major league record for consecutive hits in an extra-inning game with seven while playing for the Detroit Tigers, died Saturday of a heart attack, a friend said. He was 61.

On June 21, 1970, Gutierrez had six singles and a triple to go 7-for-7 in a 9-8, 12-inning win over Cleveland in the second game of a doubleheader. In the NL, Wilbert Robinson (1892) and Rennie Stennett (1975) had seven straight hits in nine-inning games.

Gutierrez began his career with the Caracas Lions in 1960, moved up to the major leagues with the San Francisco Giants in 1967 and played for Detroit from 1969-72. In four major league seasons, he hit .235 with no homers and 26 RBIs.

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Al Malanca

TACOMA, Wash. (AP) – Al Malanca, lead attorney for more than a dozen power companies in the legal battle over a multibillion-dollar bond default of the 1980s, died Wednesday, his wife said. He was 77.

The Tacoma attorney’s 1988 opening statement in the Washington Public Power Supply System bond default case took at least four hours, recalled law partner and friend Ken Kieffer.

WPPSS, now named Energy Northwest, was a public power consortium. In 1983, it defaulted on $2.25 billion in municipal bonds sold for construction on two of five planned nuclear power plants. At the time, the default was the largest of its kind.

Only one plant, the 1,200-megawatt Columbia Generating Station at the Hanford nuclear reservation, was ever completed. It began operating in 1984.

The construction program collapsed in the early 1980s under the pressure of rising costs, high interest rates and overestimated demand for electricity.

The cigar-loving Malanca represented utilities with 65 percent of the shares in the two ill-fated projects. The case took years to resolve and money was still being distributed to bondholders in the mid 1990s.

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David Nyhan

BROOKLINE, Mass. (AP) – David Nyhan, an influential political reporter and columnist for The Boston Globe, died Sunday at home of a heart attack after shoveling snow, the newspaper reported. He was 64.

Nyhan retired from the Globe in 2001 after 32 years. He covered the 1972 presidential campaign, served briefly as labor editor and joined the paper’s Washington bureau in 1974, becoming its news editor a year later.

He also served as White House correspondent, assistant managing editor for local news and national correspondent. He began writing his column in 1985 and was named an associate editor in 1987.

Nyhan was the author of a 1988 biography of Michael Dukakis, “The Duke.” He was a Reuters Foundation Fellow at Oxford University in 1995 and a fellow in 2001 at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy.