The National League takes the day off - the action's in the junior circuit. The defending champs try to stave off elimination!

(As in Junior Griffey and Jason Giambi)

When we asked a while back, Bauxites said the winners of the AL and NL Comeback Players of the Year would be Jason Giambi (53%) and Ken Griffey Jr. (73%).

Kudos, everyone. The Batter's Box Interactive Magazine community was right on both counts.

Three more games... and another managerial change. It never stops.

The headline and the subject matter of this story gives away the answer to a pretty good trivia question -- what is the only surname to be represented by four Hall of Famers? It's Robinson, of course, which is only the 20th-most-common North American surname, but which has graced the great game with Brooks, Frank, Jackie and Wilbert.

So here's the trivia question: there are 10 other surnames that are in Cooperstown twice (though only two of those pairs are brothers), and two more with three Hall of Famers each. How many can you name?

Orlando Hudson: 2nd best fielder in the league.

http://www.tangotiger.net/scouting/scout2005_winners.html

This is kind of silly, but I can't resist. Sorry.

An old joke: someone (I forget who) used to do a spoof of a sportscast by saying: "And tonight's baseball scores: 4-1, 3-2, 6-0, and 7-2."

The AFL season started last night. The team the Jays contribute to, the Peoria Saguaros, were an opening night bust. The Saguaros fell to Surprise 14-2, as Michael Bourn drove in 4 runs. Steve Andrade, Bubbie Buzachero, Guillermo Quiroz, Ryan Roberts and Adam Lind are with the Saguaros.

We had three playoff games, managerial changes, some front-office reshuffling, and a few early off-season rumours. Let's go, people!

Well, here we are, the end of another season. (Another year older, and deeper in debt.) Welcome to this, my last Blue Jays Report Card, this time covering September and the whole year in one panoramic swoop. Enjoy, if possible!

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 ...