One day, three games, three big early leads. One big lead shrunk down, one lead kept growing, the last one just sorta ... stayed put. NYY/LAAA ... home field advantage swings back to the Bronx Bombers.

And so it begins...

There have been thirty-eight (38) major league ballplayers to bear the last/family name of "Anderson" which is #11 on the list of "Most Common North American Surnames." That, as you might expect, is just a noodge below the 47 candidates we had for each of the #9 All-Moore and #10 All-Taylor teams.

But unlike the Moore and Taylor squads, the All-Anderson team will have a Hall of Famer -- a little .218-hitting 2B who went on to spark a much more successful career as a big league skipper in Cincinnati and Detroit.

He'll take the helm of this team, which shares its team name with that of namesake college Anderson University in Anderson, Indiana (be honest -- you didn't know the place existed, right?) meaning it's time to meet ...

In L.A. Confidential, Captain Dudley Smith tells Sergeant Jack Vincennes, “I doubt you’ve ever taken a stupid breath.” Most of the time, Alex Rodriguez is like Vincennes, if far less interesting. A perfect corporate ballplayer, seemingly incapable of an extemporaneous word, definitely incapable of adding excitement to the fine array of electronics sold by Radio Shack.

That didn't take long. The second managerial change of the day takes place in Los Angeles.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, writing for The Boston Herald, author and lifelong Cub fan Ron Berler coined the phrase and idea of "The Ex-Cub Factor."

Berler's theory was simple, as summarized by our friends over at All-Baseball.com: "Since the Cubs last won the NL pennant in 1945, only once has a team with three or more ex-Cubs won the World Series." Remarkably, this is still true -- and Berler even came up with a cockamamie way to explain away the single anomaly, postulating that 1960 PIT 3B Don Hoak had somehow overcome his "Cub-ness" and thus did not officially count against the Pirates that year.

This so-called "Ex-Cub factor" is a much-quoted (and often-mis-quoted or mis-represented) theory of the baseball universe, so there's something to this; but there are other factors to consider, too, as we head into the post-season starting ... yikes! ... later today. Let's see ...

The offseason managerial axe has fallen for the first time, less than 24 hours into that selfsame offseason: The Detroit Tigers have fired Alan Trammell, one of the great players in the team's history.

Which begs the following questions:

Your one-stop shop for roto standings, strength of opposition, "luckiest" and "unluckiest" teams, and weekly and seasonal records.

Your 2005 Champions:

Alomar Division: Thunderbirds
Barfield Division: Schroedinger's Bat
Carter Division: Pohnpei Papayas

There is a fairly predictable relationship between runs scored and allowed, and games won and lost. It does stand to reason, no?

Here's the final installment of your minor-league crew's 2005 campaign: team summaries of all six Blue Jays farm clubs, from Pulaski up to Syracuse. The author of each report is listed at the top of each section. Thanks again for tuning in all throughout this year, and the BB Minor-League Team looks forward to providing you with more great coverage in 2006.

Summer has come and passed
The innocent can never last
Wake me up when September ends

By amazing coincidence, there have been forty-seven (47) major league ballplayers to bear the last/family name of "Taylor" which is #10 on the list of "Most Common North American Surnames." The "coincidence" part comes from the fact that the last team we did, the All-Moore squad, also had 47 candidates.

Actually, come to think of it, that's less of an amazing coincidence and more of a statistical likelihood; pulling from approximately the same-sized population pool, there have been an identical number of Moores and Taylors to make the big leagues so far. (There has never been a player named "Taylor Moore," though.)

Obviously, that Taylor total does not include the four men who bore that appellation as a first/given name, nor the dozen who had it as a middle name. None of those 15 were All-Stars, either, with 2B Elliott Taylor "Bump" Wills the biggest name and 1920s-era OF Taylor Douthit probably the best player.

As with the Moores, no Taylor has yet been inducted to the Hall of Fame; but where the Moores had five former All-Stars available for roster selection, the Taylors have managed just one, former PHI 2B Tony Taylor. One place the Taylors have the advantage on the Moores ...

The Royals did their best to give this one away, but the Jays resisted the temptation...

I wish I'd thought of this when there were more than two games left in the season. But what the hell... you guys have been watching the Blue Jays all year long, right?