BY GEORGE SCHROEDER

The Register-Guard

Hammer throwers are big, and burly. In a crowd of runners and jumpers, you figure they’d be hard to overlook, harder to disrespect.

Not so, they’ll tell you.

“We’re the red-headed stepchildren of track and field,” Travis Nutter said.

So they’re really not surprised to be throwing outside Hayward Field, on an adjacent field, during the U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials. Or that their friends and families don’t have tickets.

But they’re not happy about it. Nutter, for one, might like to hammer some heads.