Personally, I prefer the one on the bottom:

They call it short-season ball, but the previews are just as long.

The Auburn Doubledays have averaged 51 wins over their last three years. In other words, going year-by-year and adjusting for a full 162-game season, they have won the equivalent of 100, 123 and 110 games from 2002 to 2004.

Alas, in every one of those years, they lost in the first round of the playoffs. Let's see how the Atlanta Braves of the NY-Penn League fare this year with the following players:

Auburn and Pulaski struggled in their short-season debuts, while the Fisher Cats made Justin Verlander feel most welcome in his AA debut.

The Burley mojo works again....not. The Jays could not overcome a rough first inning. Homers by Alex Rios and Russ Adams made the game interesting for a while, but that was really it. From the larger perspective, the show of oomph from Adams, Rios and Hill bodes well for the future. And that's our topic for today.

Answers to today's questions: the short rest seemed to affect Chacin, and the Jays' bats were lukewarm. Russ Adams continues to sting the ball, even when he makes an out.

Your thoughts?

I was messing around on ESPN, when I saw a link to a page I had never visited:

Lifers: This lists the rare players in MLB who have been with only one team throughout their careers with at least 10 years in the pros.

The Pulaski Blue Jays begin their 60th season of Appalachian League baseball Tuesday night with a match against the Danville Braves.

With a 27-43 start under their belts and sitting a mere 18.5 games out of first, the Cincinnati Reds have axed manager Dave Miley, along with fan favourite and pitcher's scrap pile saviour extraordinaire Don Gullett, Miley's pitching coach and once the most dominant LHSP in the game.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to formally retract the proclamations made in my 2005 Reds Preview, The Hunt For a Reds October, in which I concluded that the Reds would capture the NL Wild Card and meet the Yankees in the World Series.

I offer you the only explanation I can for those earlier guarantees: it was a typographical error.

Almost every article and thread on this site is devoted to watching other people play baseball. I was wondering if there are any people who play the game in any of its various forms.

Today's photo is of Alex Rios warming up in the on-deck circle:

The 2005 draft is in the books. While we can sometimes get a feel for the players drafted from various publications, other times we're left with comments like 'body like Joe Randa'.

To try and get a better feel for the draft picks we went straight to the source - Blue Jay scouting director Jon Lalonde.

Just two games for the Blue Jay farm on the eve of the short season, and neither came out in favour of the good guys.

Today I will continue my look at the Blue Jays through the numbers by examining fifteen numbers connected to the Blue Jays in the range of 35-70. All stats were taken prior to this evening’s game.

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 ...

Ted "The Tease" Lilly strikes again! An 11-2 win.

Aaron Hill? Good ballplayer or good ballplayer? Or all of the above?

And how about Eric Hinske? Yes, he's still two for his last three million, but you look for the good things where you can find them.