Team Name

Good Things

Bad Things

Lincoln Irates

Denny may have struck gold with his unconventional drafting strategy.  What an assembly of young studs.

With youth comes inconsistency, particularly in pitching.  Wins will be hard to come by with this staff the second half of the season

Kansas City Blues

Blongo only has two Royals on his team. 

Can you say injury prone.

Detroit Tigers

Soriano, Guillen and Beltre

With ten starting pitchers on his roster, let the shell game begin.

Possible non-reversion to the mean.

Omaha Bronx Bombers

Way too many Yankees or ex-Yankees on his team.

Omaha Skipjacks

West Des Moines Cubs

Lance Berkman off the DL and it looks like Jeff Kent can hit wherever he plays.

Willis and Hernandez surely have peaked.

Omaha Red Birds

Why jinx myself?

This is my last year of my bet with B.T.

Tejada will win the American MVP.

You get no points in the Bill James system for winning the MVP and the Reds will desperately need points.

Peter Gammons and John Kruk were lobbying for Chase Utley to be the every-day second baseman for the Phillies and I love Big Pappy.

Why are Garciaparra and Ordonez still on his roster?

This roster is loaded with players who have hit for the cycle.

It is very unlikely that a player will ever hit for the cycle more than once in his career, or in the case of Brad Wilkerson, more than twice in his career.

It appears that Piazza is not washed up and Pujols will win the National League MVP.

We are five weeks into the 2005 season, and Itchie’s Jax are still on top.  Never question the power of that old Itchie magic.  I pick a dog team, I’m fighting it out with the Tribe for the basement.  Itchie picks a dog team, pumps them all full of gas, relights a few dead-end careers, picks up free agent John Garland for his Cy Young year, and presto-chango! he has himself another likely winner.  If Itchie parlays this bunch to his fifth crown, I look for SloPay to go postal on him at next year’s winter meeting.  It’s always the quiet ones. 

This may draw a relevancy objection, but the recent National Football League draft reminded me once again of my general dislike of Mel Kuyper, Jr.  I’m not quite sure why I find him so annoying, but it may have something to do with the fact that other than the bombastic Indian (Eastern) TV preacher, nobody has more hair on top of his grape than Mel Kuyper.  And I know big hair. 

I have almost finished reading the excellent book on Lou Gehrig, Luckiest Man, by Jonathan Eig, that was graciously gifted to me by Possum on Draft Day.  I highly recommend it to all of you.  Among other things, I learned from this book that: 

Sweet Lou was the stud player for the most highly-touted high school team in the country, Commerce High of New York City, and took a trip to Chicago during his senior year to play in a highly-publicized game at Wrigley Field.  In his last at-bat in this all-star game, Lou lived up to his press clippings by blasting a home run way out of Wrigley and onto Waveland Avenue.  As a senior in high school, for criminy sakes. 

Lou was a star football player for Columbia U. and a projected superstar for the Columbia baseball team.  However, because he was busted for playing pro ball under an assumed name during college, he had to sit out a year at Columbia.  The lure of a professional contract with the Yankees proved to be too much to withstand, and so Lou’s college baseball glory days were over before they ever really got started. 

While in the minor leagues playing for nearby Hartford, Lou was not only a top hitter on the team, he also was a feared southpaw hurler.  Remind you of anyone else in that organization? 

According to Eig, the Wally Pipp headache story was apocryphal, and the reason that Gehrig replaced Pipp at first base was that Pipp was stinking up the joint with his hitting and the Yankees were losing.  Turns out, the same day that Gehrig replaced Pipp, two other Yankee regulars were replaced in the starting line-up as well.  So much for that baseball myth. 

As great a player as he was, Gehrig’s career was often overshadowed by virtue of playing alongside the supersized personality of Babe Ruth in the early part of his career, and then with media darling Joe DiMaggio in the sunset years of his career.  To give you an idea of how underappreciated he was in his prime, in 1934, Gehrig won the triple crown but finished fifth in the voting for AL MVP.  Go figure. 

During much of his career, Lou was thought of as a “mama’s boy,” as his strong-willed mother dominated his personal life.  While other players were taking wives (and probably girlfriends) to spring training with them to Florida, during one such trip Lou took his mother along with him.  It was a different time, wasn’t it? 

Gehrig was a late-season all-up by the Yankees when they won their first World Championship in 1923, finally beating McGraw’s New York Giants after losing the two previous Fall Classics to the Giants.  It’s not surprising that Ruth hit three home runs in the 1923 World Series, but I was surprised to learn that Casey Stengel, the Old Perfesser, hit two home runs for the Giants in that series. 

The book admirably recounts the 1927 season of the New York Yankees, the famous “Murderer’s Row,” which many people consider to be the best baseball team of all time.  This was the year that Ruth and Gehrig had a dramatic, season-long home run derby race, until Ruth pulled ahead late in the season to finish with 60, while Gehrig languished in August and September and finished with 47. 

According to Eig, the 1927 Yankees were so good that in 1928, there were cries of “break up the Yankees!”  The rumor mill had the Yankees trading Gehrig in response to pressure from around the league.  The Yankee payroll in ’27 was a whopping $350,000, tops in the majors by a ton.  Some things never change. 

Do yourself a favor and read this outstanding book.  You won’t be sorry.   Thanks again, Possum. 

Hey, when did they up and rename the Toronto Skydome the Rogers Center???  Now that’s a baseball name for you.  I hate it when they rename ballparks like the Skydome something like the Rogers Centers.  I really do. 

With his man Brian Roberts leading the league in scoring with 194 points (and on pace to crack the 1000 mark, which has previously been only Bonds and A-Rod territory), SloPay must be in hog heaven with his Irates currently in 2nd place and only 3-1/2 points behind the Skipjacks.  If the Irates can continue hitting on all cylinders for 26 weeks, anything is possible.  Remember, even the Blues were able to win this thing in that magical 1998 season.  However, this image keeps popping in my head of the Corporate Cup race that I ran in a couple of years ago, when this big girthy guy sprinted out ahead of me at the start of the race, clipping along at a seemingly unsustainable pace.  Then, at about the 1 mile mark, with more than 5 miles to go, I passed up the big fella, who probably had me by about 25 or 30 pounds, as he was huffing, puffing, wheezing and coughing to beat the band, and, if he ever did finish the race, I imagine that he crossed the finish line amidst the walkers and crawlers.  I’m not suggesting that my crummy 2005 Senators team is going to be passing up the Irates at any point during this season, but I harbor some doubts as to whether SloPay can keep up the pace.  But hey, I could be wrong.  I hope so. 

Most of Skip’s Blips this week have been dictated during my Monday drive across Iowa, also known as the Great Mistake.  Just kidding, Jimmy.   Anyway, on Monday morning I set out from Omaha for Davenport, Iowa, for a nurse expert’s deposition, and in the process crossed over both the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers.  An awful lot of driving for one day. 

Fortunately, my drive home from the eastern end of Iowa was made more than tolerable by two things.  First, a phone report from Cheryl about Will’s baseball game, and finding out that our little flamethrower struck out the side, again, to secure his team’s victory.  Will has a lot in common with Mark “The Bird” Fidrych, in terms of some of his mound idiosyncrasies, but the little guy has a live arm and throws gas.  Most of the hitters Will faces don’t even get their bat off of their shoulder until after you can hear the pop of the catcher’s mitt behind them.  He may not be the next coming of Roger Clemens, but then again, he might be.  Nothing wrong with the Old Man dreaming a little bit, is there? 

My long drive home from Davenport was also aided and abetted by baseball on the radio.  During this five-hour drive, my radio was my best friend, as I was able to tune in to five different major league contests:  Minnesota at Baltimore; Kansas City at Toronto; Detroit at Texas; the Mets at Chicago Cubs; and the Dodgers at St. Louis.  I heard the call when Mike Piazza went Yard against the Cubs in the first inning of that game, a 3-run shot off Cubs rookie Jon Leicester, making his first major league start.  I was able to listen in as my man Pujols went for his third home run of the night (he was walked by the weasel Dodger pitcher).  And I was able to listen in as the newest Senator, Chris Young, threw eight innings of shutout ball before Ranger stopper Cordero came in and ignited himself with jet fuel in the 9th.  Ahh, baseball on the car radio.  My friend.