At the close of the 2006 baseball season, there were 11 active pitchers with 200 or more career wins. With the possible exception of Roger Clemens, all are currently scheduled to return for the 2007 season.

Okay, maybe David Wells (3-5, 4.42) is done, too, but it's possible that all 11 will be in uniform next season, and joined in the "200 Club" by John Smoltz (who has 193) and Andy Pettitte (186).

What's so unusual about all this? Well ...

Well, we've moved past Friday the 13th and all the usual triskaidekaphobia stories and wisecracks, but we're still stuck on the #13 here in Baseball's Hall of Names ...

In fact, as we contine to build up a Hall of Names roster for each of  the 25 most-common male names in North America, we move to the 13th most common of those names, the name of a man who wrote some pretty famous letters (epistles, even); and on the baseball diamond, the name of another man they dubbed "Big Poison."

And with a nod to the former of those two, we can even give this team the name of a "real" professional (independent league, anyway) baseball team, as it's time to meet ...

I was writing about the Tigers the other day, puzzling out how this year's AL champs were assembled. Some of the players were drafted, some were signed as free agents, some were obtained in trade - just like everybody else.

Has there ever been a bigger birthday for MLB than October 20? That's a real question, and not just because today is my dad's birthday and we did an All-October 20 team a year ago.

Consider ...

In the early 1980s, Warren handed over his NL APBA to me, as his AL team (the Quebec Avenue Separatistes-"the Seps") kept him too busy. Terry Kennedy, Jason Thompson, Juan Bonilla, Dave Concepcion, Bill Madlock, Rick Monday and Mario Soto were the fixtures on my club, the Annex Anarchists, that went to two APBA World Series, losing both times, but the best club belonged to Rick with Tim Raines, Jose Cruz Sr. and Dale Murphy leading the way. Raines was the star in APBA, and Rick developed a special, slightly obscene, way of shaking the dice when Raines came to bat. It seemed to work, as Raines was a tremendous hitter, particularly in the clutch, in APBA.

Later on, in about 1984, Warren and I made a bet. He said that Rickey Henderson would develop more power, and I put my proverbial nickel on Tim Raines. I guess that Warren won that bet. But then, I wasn't exactly an unbiased observer (full disclosure statement).

So, the matchup is now complete: the Tigers will face the Cardinals starting tomorrow night for the big silver wedding cake.

Sorry, Coach -- I'm rooting for Detroit.  And here's Nate Robertson:

At about this time last year, I devoted a fair amount of attention to the striking discrepancy between Toronto's won-lost record and what their actual runs scored and allowed should have led us to expect. This year, of course, things returned to normal.

It would be bad luck to post a photograph of a player and request captions that poke fun at them going into that player's World Series run, right?

Well, it's a good thing that Chris Shelton was left off of the Tigers' playoff roster!

That's right, Photo of the Day will be all-Tigers until the World Series is over or I run out of Tigers. After that, it'll go back to being Photo of the Week and I'll start to burn through your non-playoff-team requests and then I'll wander through the year's archives and see what I find that didn't make it up the first time around.

Today we have Ramon Santiago admiring the trajectory of a batted ball:

Friday was Ken Macha, so it's only fitting that today's photograph should be of Tiger manager Jim Leyland.  Enjoy 'em while you can -- your season of Photo of the Day is drawing to a close.

I've been a little burnt out lately, and I probably need to take a long rest. But I do have some thoughts on the 2006 American League champions.

In the immortal words of Butch Cassidy, "who are those guys?"

Thanks to scms for pointing out the breaking news -- the A's have fired Ken Macha.

Tough gig! Four seasons, two first place finishes, two second place finishes, finally got past the first round ... hit the road, sir!

We've all heard the expression "It ain't over until Milton Bradley breaks a bat over his knee".

Well, it's over:

In honor of the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters, who won their first Pacific League pennant in 25 years last night (and now head to the Japan Series), I thought I would usurp Mick's usual gig and name an "All-Ham" Hall of Names team.

Do we really need special tools for evaulating career leadoff hitters? In one sense, we do not. Leadoff hitters do the same things that other batters do. They get on base or not. They steal bases or not. They advance from first to third on a single or not. They drive in runners on base or not. The difference is that they have a significantly different ratio of opportunites to do each of these things than hitters in other places in the batting order. That may justify the use of different tools to evaluate them. I will let the reader be the judge of that.