This week, the Boston Red Sox have made or have plans to make two trades, in each acquiring a 6'5" RHRP named Chad -- Bradford from the A's and Qualls from the Astros.

There is no truth to the subsequent rumour that they are hard after Blue Jay Chad Gaudin or that they have any chance at acquiring NL Saves leader Chad Cordero.

The truly remarkable thing about this confluence of Chadness ...

Gonna need some help on this one ... so let's throw it open to everyone.

On a team where Toby Harrah is almost certainly the shortstop, Dick Nen is the first baseman, his son Rob (oh, if he only went by Bob to be a double palindrome!) is the closer, 1980s lefty Dave Otto is quite likely to be a regular part of the rotation. You can see we need some help.

But wait, you ask, what IS a palindrome?

I know, it's not really fair -- Rob went and put together that awfully nice effort of an All-Canada Day team by using the names of the delegates at the Québec Conference of 1864, and thusly found himself stuck with source names like Chapais, Tache and Haviland -- not exactly the kinds of names you find littered throughout major league baseball history.

So it's not really a fair fight against a July 4th U.S. Independence Day squad where we find signers of the Declaration of Independence named Morris, Johnson, Clark, Lee and Williams. One suspects the American July holiday team may be a bit deeper than those "Canada Day Trippers" Rob came up with.

But before we skip to the inevitable shellacking, let's find out for sure ...

138 years ago today -- well, right now, I think -- the British North America Act recognized the Dominion of Canada. And what better way to honour those drunken louts in Sir John A's first cabinet than a Hall of Names article?

But wait, there's a twist here...

There are two things we need to remember about the Devil Rays:

1. They've only been around since 1998.

2. They suck, and they always have.

They weren't always the New York Yankees. In fact, they didn't always play in New York.

According to the good folks over at BaseballAlmanac.com (second only to the incomparable BaseballReference.com as a resource for these Hall of Names expeditions), "There are more than three-hundred fifty sets of brothers who have made it to the Major Leagues. Twenty-five members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame had a brother who also played in the big leagues. Other interesting combos include World Series Appearances, All-Star Games and pitcher vs catcher match-ups."

So it would be hard to limit ourselves to just one team of all-brothers (and we're not even talking about Hall of Fame 1B Dan and one-season cuppajoe Art who were both Brouthers, but were not brothers) when, in point of fact, you could pretty much put an All-Star lineup together using just Alous, Waners, Niekros and Alomars -- the latter of which without even including dad Sandy Sr.

So let's make the rules just a bit more stringent ...

"In baseball, my theory is to strive for consistency, not to worry about the numbers. If you dwell on statistics you get shortsighted, if you aim for consistency, the numbers will be there at the end." -- Tom Seaver

There has of course been much talk and discussion and argument on this site -- as on virtually any baseball site -- about the value of various numbers in The Great Game. And the yeoman's work Magpie is doing on compiling the "Lobby of Numbers" for each major league franchise is captivating in its own right.

It's simply true that certain numbers almost inevitably call up the images of certain athletes, baseball or otherwise -- 3 is Ruth, 12 is Namath, 33 is Jabbar on the west coast and Bird on the east coast, 99 is Gretzky. So we know the names within the numbers, so to speak -- but in the spirit of our never-ending quest for the perfect Baseball Hall of Names team, we come to wonder ... are there numbers within the names?

With apologies to the occasional Sixto Lezcano, Cy Twombley, Jack Fournier and Gene Tenace, the answer sadly, appears to be "no." That is, unless ...

As we continue our whirlwind tour of that wacky thing we call "the alphabet," it's time to construct a team entirely made up of players whose last/family name begins (or began) with the letter "K." This leads us to wonder, of course, if they'd fare well against the previously-published All-O squad -- regardless, we can rest assured that it'd be an O-K game to take in.

And no, this team will not be known as the "K Marts" (with blue light, er, light blue uniforms) -- we'll have a better name encircled by the time we get through this process; and given the multitude of options, our team uniform colours seem much more likely to be Kelly (or Kell or Kelley) green ...

Well, today is Father's Day all across North America and the United Kingdom, and as such, we could take a look back at the ode to fathers and sons in the majors posted here last year around this time.

But instead, we'll go with a followup on a more recent Hall of Names entry, the All-Nice Guys team, which was conceived by my own dear ol' dad -- who, as I have written before, is really the one who came up with this whole "Hall of Names" idea waybackwhen during the end of the Bobby Bonds Era, when I was a lad and we'd brainstorm ideas for what became the All-Food team that was the first of what is now more than 80 entries in the Hall of Names legacy.

In fact, and not for the first time, I'm just gonna turn this one over to dad (that's Mike Doherty Sr. here on Da Box) for presentation of -- and this is his team moniker, so don't blame me -- The Bad Names Bears.

They started out as the Boston Americans, and they featured none other than the great Cy Young himself in their rotation. Under the moniker of the Pilgims, they won the very first World Series ever played in 1903. They became the Red Sox in 1907 and in the 1910s put together one of the greatest teams of the decade, winning four world championships in seven years. And then the Dark Age began...

First, rest assured, the headline does NOT commit us to slogging through the careers of Danny Ainge, Mark Hendrickson, Dave DeBusschere and Ron Reed, though the latter two will get further mention for reasons unrelated to what you might expect.

Many regular Bauxites may not be aware, since legitimate NBA basketball comes to Toronto so infrequently, but there's a little series going on in Texas and Michigan right now called "The NBA Finals." In honour of that annual reminder that good defense almost always really does beat good offense, at least in hoops, we examine the possibilities of a Baseball Hall of Names paying homage to the greatest players of The Association.

But how to do this? Originally, I thought to compare the list of men in the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY with the list of those enshrined in the Hoop Hall in Springfield, Mass., but there are 258 men in the former and, coincidentally enough, 258 men (and women) in the latter, and that seemed an onerously large number of names for very little return -- the occasional David and Brooks/Jackie/Frank Robinson, the intermittent Magic and Walter/Judy/(eventually Randy) Johnson.

So what to do?

A while back, when we published the R is for Ruth, Rodriguez and Robinson (Wow!) edition of Baseball's Hall of Names, you might glean from the exclamation in the headline that it was a pretty impressive group.

That story went so far as to declare "R" the letter "that would yield the best team overall." In the immortal words of Lee Corso, not so fast my friend.

An e-mail this week from Fountain of Baseball Knowledge (tm) Mike Green pointed out that the letter "M" would field a pretty fair lineup as well. Indeed. Such an exceptional lineup, in fact ...

It's a matter of some debate whether or not Leo Durocher actually ever said "Nice guys finish last," but thanks to an idea from my inimitable, irascible dear ol' dad -- and this whole Hall of Names concept is his fault originally, as you may recall -- we are now going to test the theory overall.

Unfortunately, nobody named "Nice" has ever played big league ball. However, we have plenty of choices among the Friends, Buddys, Goodmans, Allies and Saints out there.

Or do we?

As we continue to work our way through a 25-part series outlining all-Hall-of-Names teams for each letter of the alphabet (we'll figure out something to do with "X" later), it only makes perfect sense that we would get around to "A" as the ... 10th letter of the alphabet?

Sure, why start with the first letter? Lead off with the lead-footed Richie Zisk (just about literally, as we did start with the All-Z team) and jump around until landing on "A." Which is where we are now.

Incidentally, did you know that Hank Aaron is no longer the first player listed in the official Baseball Register? ...