All the fuss about Detroit pitcher Kenny Rogers and the foreign substance on his pitching hand (and its possible influence on the elusive flight of his deliveries) is bound to find a place in World Series history. Such controversies always do when they occur on baseball's biggest stage. "Smudge-gate," or whatever you care to call it, found Rogers claiming the substance on his palm was simply dirt, while others, including St. Louis Manager Tony La Russa, arched their eyebrows over that explanation.

Rogers appeared to wash off whatever it was after the umpire spoke to him about it early in Game 2, in which he got the win. There was no inspection performed, however, and on at least one sports talk show I heard it suggested that Rogers easily could have gone on to hide a strategic substance somewhere else thereafter – under his cap or belt, for instance.

Many such skeptics figure if there's a will, there's a way, yet there is a very simple means of discreetly monitoring such possible cheating during the course of the game without conducting a full-body pat-down. Can't the home plate umpire periodically just ask to do a quick visual inspection of the ball after it's pitched? Surely, any evidence should be apparent only seconds after it arrives in the catcher's mitt.

• Carlisle, Pa., where Jim Thorpe once played a handful of sports at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, is now on the sports map a century later as the home of Dickinson College. Men's Fitness magazine recently named Dickinson, a liberal arts college of 2,300 students in south-central Pennsylvania, as the nation's fittest campus. Dickinson was cited for its physical education requirement and range of nutrition and exercise choices, not for its powerful sports teams. Rounding out the Top 10, in order, are Colgate, Boston College, Wheaton College (Ill.), the University of Vermont, Gustavus Adolphus College (Minn.), Grove City College (Pa.), Texas Christian University, Baylor, and the University of Richmond (Va.)

• Give Clemson football fans credit for using $2 bills as novel calling cards. Ever since the 1977 Peach Bowl in Atlanta, wherever Clemson fans travel, they use $2 bills (often stamped with an orange Clemson tiger paw) to pay local merchants. Doing so sends a message about the group's economic impact and makes bowl game organizers take notice when it comes time to choose which teams to invite to their games.

• It's a sorry state of affairs when liability concerns lead elementary schools to ban playing tag on the playground, as has happened at schools in Attleboro, Mass.; Cheyenne, Wyo.; and Spokane, Wash. Attleboro, in fact, has eliminated all unsupervised chase games because of the potential for collisions. Maybe everybody should just stay inside at recess.

• Seldom in pro sports does one person serve as a general manager twice for the same team. Actually, the only person I know of who has done it is hockey's Bob Clarke, who recently submitted his resignation to the Philadelphia Flyers, a franchise he's been synonymous with for nearly 36 years. Although not all those years were spent with the Flyers, he forever will be thought of as the team's original superstar for when he led a previously lackluster expansion team to Stanley Cup glory. The Flin Flon, Manitoba, native, once better known as "Bobby," captained the powerful Broad Street Bullies to NHL championships in 1974 and 1975 and was the league's MVP in '73, '75, and '76. He enjoyed success as the team's general manager during his first tour, between 1984 and '90, when the Flyers twice reached the Cup finals, although he was eventually dismissed in 1990 when a rift developed between him and the team's president. The second tour began in 1994 and lasted up until this month, when the team got off to its worst start in 17 years (1-6-1) and Clarke cited burnout and flagging desire as his reasons for stepping down. The Flyers, however, plan to keep him on in some undetermined front-office capacity.  That seems a wise move for the living symbol the club's golden era.

• Good quarterbacks, I'm convinced, must be good multi-taskers. Certainly one of the best in the current era is Indianapolis's Peyton Manning, who thrives as a one-man, on-field central command post. The way he runs the Colts' offense, often moving around right before the snap of the ball to call plays, signals that he's a multiprocessor.

• The state-of-the art field lights being used at Busch Stadium and Comerica Park during this year's World Series are called toothbrush lights, an apt description for the shape of the light towers. And speaking of lights, did you know that the NFL's New England Patriots have an official partnership with Granite City Electric Supply Company of Quincy, Mass.? The Patriots call Granite City their "official distributor of electrical supplies." I assume this means they get a good price on replacement light bulbs.

• As any longtime Dallas Cowboys watcher would know, wide receiver Terrell Owens is hardly the first guy to stir up the franchise's waters. Remember Duane Thomas and Thomas "Hollywood" Henderson? Thomas was the player who called Coach Tom Landry a "plastic man" during the early 1970s, when he briefly was the team's top rusher. He eventually decided to clam up, refusing to talk to the media for months. Henderson, an outside linebacker, loved the spotlight, as his nickname implies, and was quick to make inflammatory remarks. Both players, it eventually came out, faced drug problems that eventually forced them out of football. Henderson, however, turned his life around and now gives motivational talks with an antidrug message.

• The Detroit Tigers practiced a little one-upsmanship by building the biggest scoreboard in baseball, a 10-story behemoth that is just a tad larger than the one at Cleveland's Jacob's Field.

• Until I heard an NFL draft wonk explain the value of left tackles, I never really thought much about why teams consider them as such offensive building blocks. The explanation is that they are the players most responsible for protecting righthanded quarterbacks from blind-side pass rushers. Without a good left tackle, a quarterback is bound to be jittery in the pocket. Some draftwatchers may have noticed that when the New York Jets made D'Brickashaw Ferguson, a left tackle out of the University of Virginia, the fourth overall selection in last spring's NFL draft, their selection was cheered by oft-critical fans. They apparently knew what Ferguson's presence in the trenches could mean for the Jets, who presumably paid him the going rate. According to a story in The New York Times Magazine, left tackles were the second-highest paid players in the NFL in 2004, averaging $5.5 million a year, a sum second only to quarterbacks. In case you're wondering, the 6 ft. 6 in., 300-lb. Ferguson's first name was inspired by a character in "The Thorn Birds," a bestselling 1977 novel that was made into a television miniseries.

• Modern stadium architects have learned the lesson that creating a sense of place by connecting with the surroundings is important. The two venues for this year's World Series - Detroit's Comerica Park and St. Louis's new Busch Stadium – are perfect examples of "getting it." Both were designed to create panoramic views of the city beyond the outfield wall. The Detroit and St. Louis skylines, in a sense, are almost extensions of the stadium.

Even ballparks that are largely enclosed often utilize a "notch" concept, in which a gap is created in the grandstand that allows a glimpse to what lies outside. And old parks, too, sometimes find that their irregularities offer "windows"  on their wonderful urban character. This struck me on my first visit to Yankee Stadium, when I noticed that from my seat on the third base line that I could see trains passing through a gap between the right-field grandstand and bleachers. It was a pure slice of New York that brought more of the city inside the turnstiles.

• Overcommercialization in college sports may not always be easy to define, but you know it when you see it. That, at least, is how I felt recently during a televised game (wish I could remember which one) when a net was raised behind the goalposts that featured "Allstate" in huge letters and the insurance company's cupped-hands logo. Not only was it impossible to miss such  in-your-face-marketing, but it intruded on a traditional football scene, namely the ball sailing through the uprights against a backdrop of fans or seats, or some combination of the two. This was blatant commercialism, even if for good causes. When the net-branding started last year with 39 Division I-A teams, Allstate donated $300 per field goal and $100 per extra point to the universities and to hurricane relief.

• I never thought I'd see the day when a Louisville-vs.-West Virginia football game would be considered nationally important. This year's Nov. 2 showdown will be big since both teams are undefeated and high ranked, West Virginia No. 4 in the latest Associated Press coaches' poll and Louisville No. 6.   

• Something tells me that Carlos Beltran of the New York Mets will continue to see that wicked curveball that ended the National League Championship Series all winter long. The delivery by St. Louis rookie reliever Adam Wainwright so froze Beltran that he watched the third strike with the bases loaded and the Mets trailing 3-1 in the bottom of the ninth. Some Mets fans may find it hard to forgive Beltran for being called out instead of swinging, but others give Wainwright credit for making a tremendous pitch that broke off the table and into the strike zone.

• I can't say I'm surprised to learn that the TV coverage of the World Series is off to a sluggish start, ratings-wise. With prime-time postseason play practically a nightly event in October, it's conceivable that by the time the World Series starts, casual fans want a small breather and opt to tune in mid-Series. And speaking of audience interest, if World Series games were still played on weekday afternoons, as they once were, do you think today's schoolchildren would try to keep abreast of games in progress the way they once did? Somehow I doubt it.

• In baseball parlance, left-fielder Endy Chavez's brilliant over-the-fence catch in the seventh game of the Mets-Cardinals playoff series was a true "snow cone" – a grab in which the ball ends up sticking out of the glove webbing. It was just too bad for the Mets that robbing Scott Rolen of a two-run homer didn't serve to ignite the New York offense. 

• Tim McCarver, the Fox baseball analyst who is calling a record 17th World Series, was the St. Louis catcher when the Cardinals and Tigers last squared off in late October in 1968. Before working for Fox, McCarver was also a lead analyst for NBC, CBS, and ABC. Oh, by the way, in that '68 World Series, St. Louis lost after leading 3 games to 1. McCarver, however, did his part by batting .333 and catching in all seven games.

• Here's guessing that Detroit's Placido Polanco may be the first player in World Series history to wear a hood under his batting helmet because of the cold temperatures (44 degrees at the start of Game 2).

• The two Koreas enjoyed a thaw in their testy relations in 2000 and 2004, when they marched together in the Olympic opening ceremonies. But if tensions remain high over North Korea's nuclear weapons testing, it's hard to imagine that North and South Korea will field a unified Olympic team for the first time at Beijing in 2008, as they've agreed in principle to do.

• Some of those Detroit fans have done a masterful job of applying face paints to make themselves look like tigers. At times, you'd think they were holding a casting call for "Cats" extras at Comerica Park.

• Looking for a true sports hero? Baseball just bid adieu to one at a public memorial service in Kansas City, Mo., for Buck O'Neil, a former player-manager who became the unofficial spokesman for the Negro Leagues.  O'Neil was such a classy guy that he didn't even complain when the Baseball Hall of Fame inexplicably left him out of a last-call induction for Negro League stars this summer. Without a hint of bitterness, he actually spoke at the group's induction in Cooperstown, N.Y. At the memorial service, one of O'Neil's nieces summarized his pure-gold personal philosophy as "give without remembering and take without forgetting."

• Detroit's Comerica Park surely is the only major-league ballpark with its own ferris wheel (with cars in the shape of baseballs) and a merry-go-round. Makes me think the designer might have been influenced by the Brooklyn Cyclones, who play their games right alongside the Coney Island amusement park. The famous Parachute Jump towers over the stadium.

One of the greatest moments in Los Angeles Dodgers history won't be entirely forgotten, but the team missed an opportunity to burn it into the game's collective lore by quickly bowing out of the playoffs.  As it is, the events of Sept. 19 will be an interesting footnote in a "might have been" season in which the team fell short of making their first trip to the World Series since 1988, when they beat the Oakland A's.

On Sept. 19, LA beat National League West rival San Diego, 11-10, in one of the club's most exciting games ever – an 11-inning victory in which four consecutive Dodgers homered in the bottom of the ninth to tie the game, and Nomar Garciaparra hit a walk-off, solo home run in the 11th for the win. No team ever wants to waste such an effort, especially when only four teams have ever hit four consecutive homers in a game, and none in a more dramatic context than the Dodgers.

The Dodgers and Padres actually ended the regular season in a tie, but the Padres earned the National League West title by virtue of a better head-to-head record, while the Dodgers landed a wild-card berth.

While that home run barrage was certainly the season highlight for the Dodgers, the image that will stand out from the postseason was a rarely seen baserunning blooper. In an attempt to score on a ball hit to the outfield, Jeff Kent and J.D. Drew arrived at home plate almost simultaneously, allowing New York Mets catcher Paul Lo Duca to tag out both runners in bang-bang fashion. That snuffed out what might have been a second-inning rally, and the Dodgers never recovered thereafter, getting swept in three games.

Veteran sportscaster Vin Scully, whose tenure doing Dodger broadcasts dates to 1950, said the play turned back the clock to the club's "daffy days," in Brooklyn, when fans called them the Bums before the team's 1950s golden era.

The Dodgers finally hit the heights in 1955, with the team's first championship, before moving to LA, where it has won five World Series, in 1959, 1963, 1965, 1981, and 1988. Its overall winning percentage during 18 Series appearances, however, is only .333.

Ronan Tynan: baseball's all-star vocalist

Say what you will about the Yankees embarrassing exit from the playoffs, but they've still got the best singer in baseball. Irish tenor Ronan Tynan, who's a champion Paralympian when not hitting those high notes, has become something of a fixture with his a cappella rendition of "God Bless America"  during the seventh-inning stretch at Yankee Stadium.

It's quite a moving experience, even for TV watchers, to see Tynan standing ramrod straight, all alone on the field before a packed house, performing a beautifully unstylized rendition of this patriotic song. The New York Post says he talked his way into making his first singing appearance at the ballpark in 2000, this back when he knew little about the game. Since then, and especially since 9/11, he's become a die-hard Yankee fan and a regular presence at the ballpark.

Minors enjoy big-league baseball allure

The popularity of minor-league baseball continues to be one of the greatest success stories of the modern sports era. For the third year in a row, the minors set an attendance record with 41,710,357 fans. Many baseball people thought a long-held record from 1949, when there were more than twice as many teams (448 compared to 176 today that are affiliated with the Minor League Baseball organization), might never be broken.

Back then, teams benefitted from the existence of far fewer entertainment options (including televised games) and a population eager to enjoy family outings after World War II. Now, minor-league clubs are beneficiaries of a whole generation of college-educated marketing types.

For the seventh straight year, the Triple-A Sacramento RiverCats of the Pacific Coast League led all US Minor League Baseball clubs with an average attendance of 10,256.  Not far behind were the Memphis Redbirds and the Round Rock (Texas) Express, who play in suburban Austin. Another Texas team, the Frisco RoughRiders, were the biggest draw at the Double-A level, with 8,412 per game, while the Dayton (Ohio) Dragons were tops in Single-A with an even higher average attendance of 8,447.

Touching other bases

• Who would have imagined that the defending Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers would begin their season 1-3, or that their only victory would come not with Super Bowl MVP Ben Roethlisberger at quarterback but his backup Charlie Batch?

• In which sport, would you guess, is "the 18th tower" a coveted position? I was caught off guard by this myself when I came upon the description in a golf story about Englishman Nick Faldo taking over for CBS's lead analyst Lanny Wadkins on the all-important 18th-hole broadcasting tower.

• That a film company is using Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots, to shoot scenes for "The Game Plan," a Hollywood football movie, isn't odd. What is surprising is that the Patriots are letting Walt Disney Pictures film during the football season, even if it is during a stretch of road games. The Patriots have one of the most worn fields in the NFL. Oh, by the way, the comedy's premise – a promiscuous single NFL quarterback discovers that he has a 7-year-old daughter from a previous relationship – hardly seems the kind of storyline the NFL would embrace.

• A recent newswire photo taken at a professional baseball game in Kobe, Japan, showed a monkey, in uniform, delivering balls in a basket to the home-plate umpire. While eye-catching, the gimmick wasn't entirely novel. It brought back memories of Charlie Finley, when the former owner of the Oakland A's had Harvey, a mechanical Bugs Bunny-type rabbit holding a basket of fresh baseballs, pop out of the ground behind home plate. Finley introduced a lot of other ideas to the game in the early 1970s, including colorful uniforms that broke the white/gray mold.

• The recent passing of golf great Patty Berg brought forth a number of interesting details about her life, including that she was elected the first president of the LPGA in 1950. My favorite tidbit, though, was about her connection to another sport: football. Growing up in Minneapolis, she played on a neighborhood football team alongside Bud Wilkinson, who went on to become one of college football's legendary coaches at the University of Oklahoma. The kicker is: Berg played quarterback, Wilkinson in the line.

• The reelection campaign of Sen. George Allen (R) of Virginia ran into some unexpected turbulence recently when a University of Virginia football teammate of 30 years ago said Allen frequently used racially charged language. Allen denies the accusation. Still, it seems odd that Ken Shelton, a tight end, would stir up a controversy about the team's quarterback, but, then, maybe Allen wasn't throwing to him enough.

If you haven't yet affixed one of the new baseball postage stamps to a letter or – perish the thought – bill payment, I encourage a trip to your local post office or the USPS's online service during the postseason. The "Baseball Sluggers" collection is a set of four beautifully designed stamps made to resemble old-fashioned baseball trading cards. Larger versions of these same images come on postcards, which even more closely resemble the old cards because of roughly similar dimensions.

It's an idiosyncratic set in the sense that it pulls together four sluggers whose main connection - other than home runs - seems to be that they weren't included in a 20-player set of "Legends" stamps issued in 2000. Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, and Negro Leagues star Josh Gibson were power hitters saluted in that set.  The departed cleanup hitters honored this time around are Mickey Mantle, Hank Greenberg, Mel Ott, and Roy Campanella.

Mantle, it's safe to say, is the best known, not only because he played for the Yankees, but because he was alive most recently, having died in 1995, and also hit the most home runs of the foursome (536).  Ott had 511, Greenberg 331, and Campanella, whose career was cut short by a car accident, hit 242 during eight seasons.

Ott played for the New York Giants beginning in the 1920s and finished his career in the '40s as the team's player-manager. He's often best remembered for his unusual batting style, in which he lifted his front leg, a trademark that found a flamingo-like variation in the style adopted by Japanese slugger Sadaharu Oh, whose 868 career home runs in Japan's professional league are 113 more than Hank Aaron's Major League Baseball record.

Mantle is the switch-hitter in the bunch, actually the only switch-hitter with 500 or more homers. Although he considered himself a better right-handed hitter (which is how he's shown batting on the 39-cent stamp), the Commerce Comet hit more homers from the left side, perhaps because he was able to take advantage of Yankee Stadium's short right-field porch.

To be honored with a stamp, a person has to be gone for at least 10 years (US presidents being the only exception). In Mantle's case, his eligibility roughly coincided with the 50th anniversary of the 1956 baseball season, which many believe was his greatest. That year he won the Triple Crown by leading the American League in the Big Three batting statistics: home runs (52), runs batted in (130), and batting average (.353).

Marvin Diemer, a former Iowa state legislator, saw this as an ideal opportunity to refocus attention on Mantle. So six years ago, he began a petition drive for a Mantle stamp, which received a number of VIP endorsements, including that of Yankee fan and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. Diemer became acquainted with Mantle and former Yankee pitcher Whitey Ford when he attended their fantasy baseball camp in Florida in 1992.

Roy Campanella, whose father was of Italian descent and his mother an African-American, was baseball's first black catcher and a teammate of Jackie Robinson's on the Brooklyn Dodgers. He was the ultimate package for a player at his position: a masterful handler of pitchers, a superb backstop with a rifle arm, and an excellent hitter. In 1953, he set a single-season record for catchers with 40 home runs, and won the second of his three National League MVP awards.

Following the 1957 season, the Dodgers' last in Brooklyn, Campy was involved in an auto accident.  Largely immobilized, he never played in Los Angeles but served as a team community relations ambassador. Before the 1959 season, the Yankees agreed to travel to L.A. to play the Dodgers in a special tribute exhibition game for Campanella. The game, held in the Coliseum, attracted 93,000 to Roy Campanella Night, which is still the largest crowd to ever witness a major-league game.

Hank Greenberg's baseball biography is as interesting as anyone who's ever played the game. A native of Bronx, N.Y., he turned down an offer from the Yankees in 1930 to stay at home and back up Lou Gehrig at first base. Sensing that wouldn't mean much playing time (Gehrig once played in 2,130 straight games), Greenberg signed with Detroit and by 1933 was a fixture in the Tiger lineup.

Whereas Campanella may have had to deal with racial discrimination, Greenberg, who is often called baseball's first Jewish superstar, had to cope with ignorance about and prejudice toward his faith.

In "Dingers," Peter Keating's excellent book about the history of home runs and the players who hit them, he says the Cubs rode Greenberg mercilessly during the 1935 World Series, won by the Tigers. Other times, he had to deal with "clueless" individuals, including reporters who covered Jewish individuals "almost as members of a different species – not necessarily negative, definitely apart." (Keating, by the way, calls the award-winning 1999 documentary "The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg" the best film ever made about a slugger. It took Aviva Kempner 13 years to produce it.)

As a babyboomer growing up in the 1960s, I was vaguely familiar with Greenberg from seeing a card of him among a special oldtimers' set. I knew few of the details, however, including that he had hit 58 home runs in 1938 or that his big-league career was twice interrupted by military service. He missed most all of the 1941 season after being drafted by the Army, and became the first major-leaguer to reenlist following the attack on Pearl Harbor later that year. Instead of opting for a stateside job, he elected to serve in the Army Air Corps in the China-Burma-India Theater.

Since the early 1970s, I've felt a minor attachment to Greenberg because his daughter once worked briefly as a copykid at The Christian Science Monitor while I was beginning my long career with the newspaper. I can't say we became friends. My recollection is that she was quiet and reserved, but I interpreted her presence at the Monitor as a sign of her family's admiration of quality journalism.

When the Postal Service dedicated the "Baseball Sluggers" stamps in the Bronx in July, Alva Greenberg was there. Curious about where life's path has taken her, I went online and discovered that she owns an art gallery, "Alva Gallery", in New London, Conn. According to the site, she was born in Cleveland in 1952, when her dad, who later became an investment banker, managed the Indians. Her love of art was cultivated in New York, however, while growing up among artists and collectors.

But getting back to her dad, one of the fascinating finds about his career is that Greenberg became baseball's first $100,000 player in January, 1947. And, ironically, this occurred after the Tigers placed him on waivers rather than raise his salary to $75,000. The Pirates signed him to the historic deal and saw him play just one season in Pittsburgh before retiring. Eventually he became part owner and general manager of the Cleveland Indians, and was with that team when it set an American League record with 111 wins in 1954. Many years later, Hammerin' Hank went to bat for another player seeking to make salary inroads, Curt Flood. Although Flood was unsuccessful in his attempt to overturn baseball's reserve clause, he set the stage for the free-agent era.

One can see that there's a lot of baseball history represented in these "Sluggers" postage stamps.

Collectors surely will value them, probably more than many of the baseball-themed commemoratives in circulation. Oddly enough, most of these (more than 400) have been issued by a host of countries other than the US, which didn't get around to honoring any individual players (Ruth, Gehrig, Jackie Robinson, and Roberto Clemente) until the 1980s.

The first foreign baseball stamp was issued in 1934 by the Philippines on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Olympics-like Far Eastern Championship Games. Over the years, many other countries have gotten into act, capitalizing on the interest from collectors that the USPS has been slow to satisfy.

Some of these stamps would surprise American fans, such as ones from the Central African Republic that bear the images of major-leaguers Roger Clemens and Robin Yount. Or the 1988 stamp issued by Canada on the 150th anniversary of baseball in that country, which calls into question who came first to the American "national pastime."

Whatever your taste in stamps, though, "Sluggers" are worthy additons to the march of commemorative stamps – and they pay timely tribute to some of the greats as we settle into watching baseball's annual postseason blitz.

Photos courtesy of the US Postal Service.

Like many of us, Howard Blum enjoys chewing the fat about baseball. What makes Blum different, besides being a labor lawyer, is that he and friend Michael Kun, a lawyer turned novelist and short-story writer a continent apart, turned their e-mail debates and exchanges into one of this season's most intriguingly titled books, "The Baseball Uncyclopedia." As the subtitle explains, this is "A Highly Opinionated, Myth-Busting Guide to the Great American Game." If not the antithesis of a serious encyclopedia, it's surely a lot more of a fun-filled, editorialized ride.

Kun works in Los Angeles, Blum in Boston, but their mutual interest in baseball is what has kept them sane when they've needed a break from the mental rigors of the law and novel-crafting. They've turned their electronic water-cooler conversations into a published work that doesn't take itself so seriously, as many baseball books are want to do.

At his first book signing and talk, held in a bookstore basement in the Boston suburbs, I heard Blum admit to being a rookie at this sort of thing. He wasn't sure what to say or do, but was committed to keeping it casual, including his attire. "It's only a lecture if you have your jacket buttoned," he volunteered.

Among the widely held "myths" the authors address is the notion that a tie always goes to the baserunner when ball and runner simultaneously reach the bag. They remind us that the rules state the runner must beat the throw to the bag to be called safe. 

They also point out that the reason the foul pole is considered in fair territory is simply because the rulebook says so. Maybe, the "Baseball Uncyclopedia" suggests, it should be called the fair pole.

The authors go on to say ...

- in their opinion, the late 1970s White Sox wore baseball's ugliest uniforms - collared jerseys that sometimes were worn with shorts and white knee socks.

- Seattle's Safeco Field is the best ballpark in America ("They thought of everything....")

- two former Cardinals are honored along with Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, and Mickey Mantle in Yankee Stadium's centerfield Monument Park (Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II both celebrated masses there, so they too were honored with plaques.)

- and that the first three words of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" are not "Take me out."  Instead, they are the opening words of the chorus. There are actually two versions of the famous song, both written by vaudevillian Jack Norworth, who started off one version with "Katie Casey was" (audio)," and the other with "Nelly Kelly loved."

The authors take each other on, arguing whether Cal Ripken Jr. was overrated. Definitely not, says Kun, who calls Ripken one of the five best shortstops of all time, pointing out that he was a highly dependable, if not flashy, fielder who redefined the batting expectations of those who play the position with his home run power. Blum, on the hand, is blunt. "Cal Ripken was a .276 hitter," he says, adding, "I have nothing more to say on this issue."

Now that the inaugural World Baseball Classic is in the books, it's time step back and reflect on what happened and share some accumulated impressions.

On the whole, this was a solid start in creating a true world series, a tournament that illustrated the advanced state of the sport's international development. American fans may have been disappointed that Team USA didn't make it into the semifinals, but the presence of Japan, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and South Korea actually created an intriguing East-West balance that nicely showcased the differences in playing styles.

Visiting international fans, immigrants, and naturalized Americans helped to energize the atmosphere at many of the US-based games, but American fans didn't really take to this event as was hoped.

The Classic was out of sync with the host country's sports body clock. Americans love their baseball, but every culture develops its spectating habits, and, for native-borns, "important" games shouldn't occur before crabgrass sprouts. We're accustomed to a traditional sports calendar in which meaningful games properly fall at the end of long, hot summers and grinding pennant races.

March clearly has been ceded to basketball's March Madness, which overpowered and overshadowed the World Baseball Classic on the sports pages, in the TV ratings, and in water-cooler conversations.

I knew the WBC was on shaky ground, for example, when my most ardent baseball-following co-worker, a guy who knows major-league depth charts, turned to me one day and asked for a WBC update. He admitted the tournament hadn't pricked his interest.

When to play it is a problem. Put simply, there isn't a good time, at least not for everybody. The baseball season varies around the globe, and Major League Baseball, a prime mover and shaker in creating the tournament, is opposed to having it disrupt the MLB season. As result, the event was slotted during spring training, when major leaguers can more easily break away from their regular teams but also when they're less likely to be in midseason form.

This didn't prove a disadvantage for the Japanese, who won the championship by beating Cuba, where the 90-game pro league season runs from December to April. During an ESPN interview, Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig acknowledged the scheduling difficulties, but said that holding the tournament in November, after the World Series, was no better. That, he reasoned, would mean that players not in the playoffs might be just as rusty as they are in the spring. Then, too, the only way to schedule games in North America in November would be in indoor stadiums, which is far from ideal.

The final rounds of the World Baseball Classic presumably will move around to different locales over time, but the US obviously offers the best combination of parks and climate. The next tournament will be held in 2009 at undetermined sites, and every fourth year thereafter, just like the Olympics and soccer's World Cup.

One country that would dearly love to host the final rounds is Cuba, but before that happens Havana would probably need to build at least one modern, state-of-the-art stadium. In 1987, I had the opportunity to attend a Cuban-league game in that city. The ballpark (I forget its name) was decent-sized and looked structurally sound, but like many things in Cuba, it felt out of date, like something from the 1950s stuck in a time warp. The feeling extended to the playing field, where photographers were allowed to snap pictures of batters from close range just outside the foul lines. I've seen old black-and-white images that show the same thing happened in US parks, but that was eons ago.

Japan will probably want to host the semifinals and finals next time, and as the defending champions they've earned the privilege. TV ratings reportedly were staggeringly good for Japan's semifinal showdown with South Korea.

Still, there are questions, including whether the 55,000-seat Tokyo Dome is really the ideal spot for the championship rounds and whether good attendance would be too dependent on Japan's performance.

Gene Orza of the Major League Baseball Players Association raised this point on the World Baseball Classic's website, where he said the Japanese must establish that they are able to draw large crowds even when Japan isn't playing. "If we hold a final in Japan that winds up being Cuba playing the US," he said, "I have no good feeling about what kind of attendance that would be."

Something tells me, though, that given the opportunity to be squarely in the baseball limelight, Japan would rise to the occasion, disappointing neither on the field nor in the stands.

Touching other bases

• For all the hype about the World Baseball Classic pulling together major-league players, only two big-leaguers played in the championship game, both for Japan - outfielder Ichiro Suzuki of the Seattle Mariners and Akinori Otsuka of the Texas Rangers.

• One of the cooler ideas used to decorate the WBC ballparks was rainbow-striped bunting in the tournament's colors. It was a clever variation on the red-white-and-blue bunting so often seen of Opening Day and draped on grandstand railings at World Series time.

• South Korea was the only team in the 16-team field that didn't commit an error. That impressed a lot of observers, including an awestruck Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees, who noted, "You don't see one guy bobble the ball. I don't know how they do that."

• The Dominican Republic had a power-packed lineup, but they still could have used prominent no-show Manny Ramirez in a semifinal loss to Cuba. Ramirez is one of the 3 best natural hitters in the game, and tellingly, he hit his first spring training home run for Boston the day after the DR's elimination.

• Granted, the World Cup-style format will take some getting used to by fans, especially Americans not familiar with all the ins and outs that allow a team like Japan, which lost to the US and was a lackluster 3-3 in the first two rounds, to go on and win all the marbles.

• Hats off to Ken Griffey Jr., the only American besides Derek Jeter to make the all-tournament team. And he did so with probably the best batting stats of anyone: .524 average, three home runs, and 10 runs batted in.

• The large number of players who watched games from the top step of the dugout was one indication of their intense engagement in the games.

• People expect the Dominican Republic and Cuba to be major rivals for the US, but who would have imagined that the Americans would lose to both Canada and Mexico?

• I sensed a bit of a dig at the Yankees and owner George Steinbrenner in the full-page ad WBC organizers ran in The New York Times this week. Steinbrenner never got behind the tournament and didn't encourage his players to participate. Beneath a full-color photo of the victorious Japanese team hoisting manager Sadaharu Oh are these words: "Congratulations, Team Japan! ...With passion. With intensity. With pride. You were there for your country." Steinbrenner, it might be noted, is generally known for his patriotism and once was a major cheerleader for the US Olympic movement.

• If there's a flaw in the WBC format it is the single-game semifinals and final. Baseball, unlike other sports, is based on playing games in series, in both the regular season and the playoffs, and there is a reason for this. The sport is heavily focused on pitching, and to determine who has the best team, not just the best individual pitcher, requires playing more than one game.

Baseball sage Satchel Paige once famously advised, “Don’t look back; they may be gaining on you.”

As any historian would tell you, however, looking back is not inherently a bad thing. Last week, for example, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum clearly demonstrated the value of examining the past.

As spring training was heating up and the inaugural World Baseball Classic beginning, a special group of electors assigned to study the Negro Leagues and pre-Negro leagues elected 17 new members.

Most notable among them was Effa Manley, the first woman so honored. Like Satchel, she too could utter a memorable line. One of her best may have come in response to those who counsel, “Don’t live in the past.” Her reply: “I guess it depends on how interesting your past is.”

Needless to say, hers is very interesting, but she wasn’t a player. Her achievements were as an executive who co-owned the Newark Eagles, a team that won the Negro World Series in 1946, the year before Jackie Robinson broke the major-league color line.

Ms. Manley was the obvious headliner in this special Hall of Fame class, but the attention her selection brought also served to raise two major questions related to the election:

1) Why was Buck O’Neil, the former Negro League star whose name is synonymous with pre-integration black baseball, shut out of the Hall of Fame?

And…

2) Shouldn’t the first woman elected have been a player, not an owner? Or at least, shouldn’t Manley have shared the honor with a player from the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the circuit that existed between 1943 an 1954 and was made famous in the movie, "A League of Their Own"?

The first of these questions is the one that has created the biggest furor over what many observers, at least in the media, perceive as an incredible injustice.

Baseball people sometimes are blinded by statistics, and that may have kept O’Neil from his rightful place in Cooperstown, N.Y. Surely other Negro League players compiled better numbers, but he's in his own league when it comes to lifetime achievement and pure, unadulterated class.

Filmmaker Ken Burns recognized this when he made O’Neil the voice of the old Negro Leagues in the PBS documentary on the history of baseball. With his eloquence, love of the game, and firsthand experience, O’Neil was perfect for the role. He joined the Kansas City Monarchs, one of the premier teams in the Negro Leagues, in 1935, became the club’s player/manager in 1948, and remained with the organization through the end of the 1955 season.

He once barnstormed with Satchel Paige, who, in 1971, became the first black player elected to the Hall of Fame, and has been a tireless advocate for greater recognition of Negro League players. In fact, today he is the chairman of the board for the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, which is planning a $15 million expansion.

O’Neil’s portfolio also includes becoming the first black coach in the major leagues, with the Chicago Cubs in 1962, and success as a scout who signed Hall of Famers Ernie Banks and Lou Brock. Plus he is a man of sterling character.

One might think all these credentials would have made O’Neil a shoo-in for a special election of hall-worthy Negro Leaguers. But he came up a vote shy of being selected, appearing on only 8-of-12 ballots, when 9 were needed for election.

The irony is that the voters were drawn from a distinguished group of scholars and historians of Negro Leagues baseball, people who surely know and appreciate O’Neil’s place in the game.

The voting was by secret ballot and the electors made a pact not to discuss their individual votes. So we may never know why four individuals didn’t see fit to elect O’Neil. But in the effort to create an unparalleled statistical record of the Negro Leagues (culled from decades of box scores in 128 newspapers and compiled in a new book, “Shades of Glory”), Major League Baseball may have created a stats-heavy orientation by funding an exhaustive data search.

O’Neil’s lifetime batting average was .288, which is short of the magical .300 mark many members of the Baseball Writers Association of America use informally as a cutoff in casting their ballots in regular voting for the hall.

Even so, O’Neil, a first baseman whose autobiography is titled “I Was Right on Time,” turned in four .300-plus seasons, including a career best of .358 in 1947 and a league best of .353 in 1946. He also played in three Negro American League All-Star games and in two of the league’s World Series.

Fay Vincent, the former MLB commissioner and the nonvoting chair of the special selection committee, said that only 1 percent of people who play in the majors make it into the Hall of Fame. O’Neil, he added, “was honored by being a very strong candidate” in a process that began with a pool of 94 that was winnowed to 39 before the final vote.

There was no quota on how many could be elected. Eighteen, beginning with Satchel Paige in 1971, were already in via regular elections of the Committee of Negro League Veterans. This project was meant as a one-time catch-up vote so that all the overlooked players wouldn’t have to wait another day to be recognized.

Vincent expressed sadness that this hadn’t happened 30 or 40 years ago when so many more candidates were alive. All 12 players and five executives voted in this time will receive their honors posthumously, and one of the voters, Robert Peterson, author of the seminal work “Only the Ball Was White,” cast his ballot just two days before his passing.

When the annual Hall of Fame inductions are held on July 30, only one new enshrinee, relief pitcher Bruce Sutter of the modern era, will be present.

Meanwhile, two living greats, 94-year-old O’Neil and 83-year-old Cuban Minnie Minoso, an outfielder who became the majors’ first black Latin player when he joined the Cleveland Indians in 1949, will be on the outside looking in. Minoso was an All-Star four times, won three Gold Gloves, and had a .298 lifetime batting average.

Bob Kendrick, director of marketing for the Negro Leagues museum, says the organization has intentionally avoided creating its own hall of fame, preferring instead that deserving Negro Leaguers be enshrined at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

When the hall announced its new honor roll, Kendrick had to tell O’Neil, the chairman of the Negro Leagues museum, that he’d come up short of election before a perearranged Kansas City press conference.

O’Neil took the disheartening news with incredible grace and equanimity, although Kendrick found himself straining to hold back the tears. It was a bittersweet occasion to be sure, because there was cause for rejoicing over the wholesale selection of 17 new Negro League Hall of Famers, but a crushing sadness that the person so instrumental to their recogntion was left behind. When O’Neil entered the press conference in Kansas City, those in attendance rose to give him a standing ovation.

“As more information comes to light down the road, the door is always open to the possibility of perhaps further consideration,” said Hall of Fame president Dale Petroskey.

One can only hope that more information won’t be necessary for an immediate reconsideration. No individual who has left such a lasting legacy to baseball should be relegated to the bench.

The National League has now lost eight straight games during back-to-back World Series. The Cardinals and Astros were as listless as any pair of teams ever to reach the Fall Classic. Neither team generated any spark on baseball's biggest stage, and you know it wasn't for lack of trying or motivation. So what happened?

Both teams were better than they looked, and while any number of explanations can be given for their collapses, to some degree it comes down to the streakiness that's part of the game. Both teams hit a bad stretch at the worst possible time.

It wasn't the first time teams have been swept in consecutive World Series. Sweeps have occurred four other times, in 1927-28, 1938-39, 1989-90, and 1998-99, and on three of those occasions the mighty New York Yankees administered the drubbings.

•Let's hope any sportswriters still tempted to call the champion White Sox the Pale Hose for the sake of variety will suppress the urge. Pale Hose is too "old school," a vestige from an era of passé sports journalism.

•One of the unfortunate aspects of baseball's multidivision format and three-tier playoff system is that "winning a pennant" isn't as special it once was. Nowadays it's all about getting into the playoffs and reaching the World Series, whether as a division winner or a wild card. Winning a pennant has become more a step along the way in the playoffs than a singular, stand-alone achievement emblematic of season-long excellence.

•A well-executed bunt is a thing of beauty as the posteason proved a number of times. Oddly, the skill continues to elude a lot of major leaguers, who never master the art of advancing a runner by dropping down a slow roller. If Houston pitcher Roger Clemens can execute the sacrifice, as he did in that 18-inning National League Championship Series marathon, then everyday position players should be able to as well.

•As one might expect, especially for a Texas team, the Houston Astros have a decent number of Latino players. What is striking is the absence of a single African-American on the roster in a city with the fifth-largest black population (494,496) in the United States. This fact drew media attention during the World Series, since it was the first time since 1953 that a World Series participant didn't include a black player. Observers tend to chalk this up to baseball's eroding appeal for black athletes, not to racial discrimination. "It's a daunting task to get African-American kids into baseball, and I don't see the trend changing," said Hall of Famer and TV baseball commentator Joe Morgan, an African-American who once played for the Astros. Black players constitute about 9 percent of big-league rosters.

•It was fun to see the Bushes, Barbara and ex-prez George, in the background, behind home plate, in all those World Series games played in Houston's Minute Maid Park. Presumably, they were given the choicest seats in the house. Personally, I’ve never thought a field-level seat looking through the backstop is that desirable. But give the Bushes credit. They seemed happy to be baseball railbirds, in among the crowd instead of up in some elevated VIP luxury box.

•The best summary of the White Sox-Cubs cultural divide I've come up with, as an outside observer, is stockyard vs. stock market.

•Surely there were a lot of clever headlines about the White Sox triumph, but for combining simplicity and history it would be hard to top "Say It Is So," which ran in The Boston Globe.

•If there's another major professional sports team besides the White Sox whose "colors" are black and white, it doesn't come to me. Lots of teams have taken to using black in combination with their colors, and the black-adorned Oakland Raiders of the NFL and San Antonio Spurs of the NBA have always used silver to good effect. The White Sox have occasionally added splashes of colors over the years, but it seemed fitting that they were were in their unflamboyant road grays, with black accents, when they clinched the World Series.

Over the past three years, the rivalry between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox has had more story lines than a soap opera and more twists and turns than a spaghetti dinner. After 2003 and 2004, which brought some of the most compelling postseason baseball from these two historic rivals, players on both the Red Sox and the Yankees seemed to think that a third straight meeting in the postseason was a foregone conclusion. It was going to be the winner-take-all series for bragging rights in the Northeast, the conclusion to the conflict that had been so likened to "Star Wars" that no one blinked when Chewbacca threw out the first pitch to one of Boston’s last regular season games. A third straight meeting would fulfill the script and complete the trilogy…

However, the Chicago White Sox and the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim left the Red Sox and Yankees on the cutting room floor, as the teams not from New York or Boston prevailed in their respective American League Division Series, denying the rematch that would have been hyped beyond hyperspace.

But baseball might better off this way.

Sure, the romance, intrigue, passion, triumph, and heartache of another Red Sox–Yankees series would have been compelling, but now fans get to see some actual good old-fashioned baseball, without the histrionics that often cloud the games between the Red Sox and Yankees. In addition, some baseball fans were sick of the Red Sox–Yankees rivalry and glad to see two other American League teams in the postseason spotlight for a change.

Although some will miss (registration required) the prime-time drama of the Sox-Yanks feud, others think this White Sox – Angels series is the way baseball was meant to be played. Great base running, bunting to manufacture runs, quality relief pitching, and solid defense. No $200 million payrolls or all-star lineups that try to outslug each other. These games will be more chess match than wrestling match, and they should be fun to watch. If Game 1 is any indication, each game in this series should be tight.

Even National League teams are seeing a little more national attention thrown their way since the Red Sox and Yankees' playoff exit. In case you weren’t paying attention, the Houston Astros and the Atlanta Braves staged an epic 18-inning battle in Game 4 of their National League Division Series, the longest game in postseason history, and the Astros prevailed on a walk-off homer by rookie Chris Burke. The ageless Roger Clemens pitched the final three innings for the Astros without giving up a run for the win, and they advanced to face the Cardinals in the National League Championship Series, which begins Wednesday night. It will be a rematch of last year’s NLCS, which went seven games, and although the Astros don’t have 2004 postseason hero Carlos Beltran anymore, they will look to prove the adage that "good pitching beats good hitting," as they take on the NL’s best offense with perhaps baseball’s best pitching staff.

Imagine a skinny, little 15-year-old boy from a suburb in Japan coming to the United States for the first time in his life. For summer vacation. It was his first time away from his mom and dad, and one of the first times he would even leave his hometown alone for an extended time.

He didn’t speak English, and would be staying with a family in California for a month, and going to a summer camp with American kids.

The boy encountered many culture shocks: what the heck is peanut butter? Why do these people eat that sugared-popcorn-snack-like thing in the morning? And with milk poured on it, no less! But the most jaw-dropping of all was witnessing major league baseball for the first time.

And it came in the form of the almighty 1989 Oakland Athletics.

He wasn't a crazy baseball fan (like he is now), but he liked his Japanese hometown team, the Chunichi Dragons. He had heard of the major league, but really didn't know much about it.

On the team, there was a skinny black man stealing bases like no other (that player’s name, the boy later found out, was Ricky Henderson). There was a scary-looking, un-hittable closer who "shuts the door" on the other team (Dennis Eckersley). There was this manager, people called him a genius, who seemed always seemed to know what would happen next (Tony LaRussa). But the crazed fans were really going nuts for the Bash Brothers, Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco.

McGwire was blond-haired, blue-eyed and broad-shouldered, looking like Superman and hitting the ball out of the park. Ditto for Canseco.

No matter how far behing their team ever was, they could change the game with a swing of their bats. It was exciting to watch them. They put fear in the eyes of opposing pitchers.

It was magic. It was out of this world. It was like a Hollywood movie or a sci-fi, super-hero comic book. The boy said to himself, "Wow, this is AMERICA."

That skinny kid was me, and this was my first encounter with major league baseball. Though I've changed my pledge to a Boston team since then (and I'm not so skinny and I eat that sugared-popcorn-snack-like thing for breakfast), it is not overstating it to say that my love and admiration for the game of major league baseball was formed that summer.

That's part of why it has been so heartbreaking to see now-admitted cheater Canseco ripping into his "brother" McGwire about steroid use in his book,"Juiced". And then to see McGwire, called before the US Congress to testify about steroid use in the major leagues, on advice of his attorney saying little more than: "I am not here to talk about the past.”

I feel cheated.

The little boy in me is saying, "Say it ain't so." The magic is gone. The superheroes were cheating.

They were, after all, not very "super." Between steroid use and the ridiculous money the players are making, though I still love the game and watch many games on the TV and from the bleachers, I do so as a cynical adult. My excitement and joy will never be as great as that pure "wow" I experienced 16 years ago.

One of the congressmen at the hearing said it. "Whether you like it or not, the professional athletes are role models to many children." Major League Baseball and its players owe it to the kids, like that kid from Japan, to clean up its act.

Steroids: I'm totally opposed to them. And my personal belief is that there is not a single high-performance athlete left in the world who isn't either doing steroids, or who hasn't done them in the past.

That's the reason a few years ago I advocated that we just dump the Olympics altogether, since we can no longer be sure that the games aren't the biggest doped-up gathering since Woodstock.

Now baseball finds itself unable to shake the steroid boogeyman, and we all know that home-run hitters such as Mark McGwire or Barry Bonds will never be truly acknowledged as the greatest hitters who have ever lived. They may own the records, but those records will have a huge asterisk beside them, even if only in the minds of baseball fans (because baseball commisioner Bud Selig will never admit all those home run records are tainted.)

I find Barry Bonds' talk about the 'race card' whenever he is confronted with his performance-enhancing drug use truly offensive, especially when you consider the real racism great players like Willie Mays and Hank Aaron had to endure during their great, steroid-free careers. Bonds just sounds guiltier and guiltier day by day and I doubt that there is a single baseball fan in America (even if they like Bonds) who doesn't believe that Barry is a regular user.

But here's the problem. How do you convince kids not to do this?

Sure, baseball has initiated a steroids testing program, but the first offense is only a brief 10-game suspension. After the first couple of players are caught doing steriods, this punishment will become meaningless. At least if you get caught cheating by Olympic officials, you are suspended for two years.

And then there is the biggest advertisement of them all for steriod use - the governor of California.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, after all, has long admitted his steriod use, but has never really said it was wrong. He's rationalized it ("We were all doing it' or "It wasn't illegal then") and joked about it, but never said he is truly sorry for having done it and that it was basically cheating.

While the governor has called on bodybuilding officials to crack down on steroid use (now that he's not competing, of course), critics point to the fact that he refused to sign a bill last year that "would have created a list of banned substances for interscholastic sports and required coaches to take a course on performance-enhancing supplements." Schwarenegger said it was too "vague" about supplements.

The truth of it is that if Schwarzenegger hadn't done steroids, he would not be governor of California today. Steriods helped him win those seven Mr. Universe competitions, which led directly to his movie career, which led to his political career.

Now, if you're a kid in America, and you're looking at all the money made by people like Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds, or the political career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, as opposed to those who say its 'bad' for you to take steriods, who might you be inclined to emulate?

That's why I'm worried that, as bad as the steriod problem seems today, we may only be looking at the tip of the iceberg.

It's hard to put in words how those of us who live in Red Sox nation feel today after last night's game seven ACLS victory over the New York Yankees. So let me give you an image.

You know the movie "A Christmas Carol"? No, not that weird Albert Finney musical one, or the George C.Scott or Patrick Stewart versions.

I mean the real McCoy – the 1951 black and white British version (also known as "Scrooge") starring Alistiar Sims. There is a scene near the end of the movie, in which Scrooge (played by Mr. Sims) has woken up to discover his is still alive and that 'the spirits' had made all their visits in one night. And that he has been given one more chance to change his life.

Then Scrooge starts to dance around the room. And laugh. He can't help himself, he is just so happy.

Everytime I see that scene, and I've seen it dozens of time, it still overwhelms me with a wave of great happiness and joy. And the smile I can't wipe off my face for hours.

That's how Red Sox nation feels this morning: like the 'spirits' have done it all in one night, and we have a new life. So we dance and laugh. And we just can't help ourselves, because we just feel so darn good.

So darn good.

I've been smiling since 12:01 a.m. this morning when Ruben Sierra grounded out to Pokey Reese to end the game. I think I smiled in my sleep.

Now I have to say that I'm not a person who believes that sports transcends the important stuff - like that upcoming national election. In the end, baseball is just a kids' game played by a group of millionaires. But sports can create moments that inspire and serve as guide posts for us to deal with and understand the stuff that really does counts.

I watched the game with my son Liam. This morning as we talked about the game, I asked him what he had learned from the Red Sox stunning comeback from three games down. "Never give up," he said to me. "No matter how bad things look, never give up."

I don't know if the Sox will win the World Series. But even if they don't, they've already given us something more important than I can properly put into words.

So excuse me, I've got to stop writing. I just want to dance and laugh.

And smile for days.

He did it. He hit number 258. In the third inning of the game against the Texas Rangers Friday night, Seattle Mariner's right fielder, Ichiro Suzuki hit a single up the middle. And with that, he broke the 84-year-old major league single-season hits record, set by St. Louis Browns first baseman, George Sisler in 1920.

I grew up in Japan, in a neighboring town from where Ichiro grew up. He was a year older than me and I remember when he competed in the national high school baseball tournament, called koshi-en, when I was in the 11th grade. He was a pitcher then. A year after that, he was drafted by Orix BlueWave, and became an outfielder. In 1994, he changed his on-field name to his first name "Ichiro" and set a new single-season hits record for Japanese Pro Baseballl League. He also set new record of safely reaching base for 69 consecutive games, and flirted with the possibility of being first batter to hit .400.

He was, for seven years in a row, both a batting champ and Gold Glove winner for the Pacific League, from 1994-2000. He was named MVP three times during that span, helping the team win the league twice.

He signed with the Seattle Mariners in 2001. Ichiro is the first position player from Japan to cross over to the majors. The entire nation of Japan was watching his every move. I remember reading that there were 100 media members from Japan following him in spring training. And they had to report something new on him, everyday. Now, that's pressure. Everyone expected him to do well. Meanwhile he had to change his lifestyle, learn a new language and culture, eat different food, deal with the crazy travel (by Japanese standards) in the US, and play 30 more games per season.

Added together, that is not an easy thing to do.

I remember his first year very well. It was a huge deal for Japanese baseball fans. I was living here in Boston. The Red Sox had another Japanese pioneer player, Hideo Nomo. I saw the "Dream Match" (as it was billed by Japanese media) at Fenway Park. There really were like 100 Japanese media there. It was a zoo. Both Ichiro and Nomo were the pride of Japan.

And he did it. That year, under that intense pressure, he hit a single right past the pitcher in his first Major League at bat, and went on to win the American League batting title and the most stolen bases title. In the All-Star game, he beat Randy Johnson to the bag to get an infield single. He was awarded Rookie of the Year and MVP.

He is the kind of player that is very exciting to watch. He is the true lead off hitter because he gets on base. He is so fast he turns a "routine ground ball" into a hit. He makes a baseball fan like myself, little league kids in Japan and US, and young aspiring players alike, say "Wow!" And that is why I like baseball. As a young kid, I had a Chunichi Dragons (my home team) player's poster on my wall. And watching Ichiro play brings back the feeling of awe and amazement I felt growing up.

On the personal level, It is great to see his success. Although I admit if the Mariners were in the playoffs to face my beloved Red Sox, I would have written this a lot differently, it really cheers me up to see that he is doing so well far away from home. When more players like him from all over the world come to the Major Leagues, we can truly call the championship game a "World Series."

My hometown team, the Boston Red Sox, is doing great. But my "home" hometown team, the Chunichi Dragons, is doing even better. They are leading the league, four-and-half games ahead of the Japanese "evil empire," Yomiuri Giants as of 9/6.

I check their stats and standings on the net every week. As I was doing my weekly browsing of websites today (The Internet was made for "remote" fans like me!), a headline caught my attention: "Players vow to strike."

My first thought: Whoa, are the 2004 Dragons going to be the 1994 Montreal Expos? One of the biggest "what-if" baseball teams, the Expos had the best record in the Majors before the MLB went on strike that year.

I had to call my dad: "What will happen to our team if they go on strike?"

"Well, actually, they are only going to strike on weekends, so the chances get better for us," my dad replied. Good news, the Dragons were going to face the Giants on the weekend of 9/18, so there is less chance of them gaining ground on us.

But is it really good news?

My dad and I talked about a bigger problem that the Japanese Professional Baseball league is facing - "If the league goes on strike, the fans are not going to like it," he said. As it is, Japanese baseball fans are already losing interest. There are many reasons, but lack of fair competition is one. Another is that many of the star players are going to the major leagues in the United States, leaving their home league. Japan's all-pro-players Athens Olympic "Dream team" also fell short of the gold, just another major upset to the fans.

There are two leagues in Japan, just like Major League Baseball, the Central League (CL) and the Pacific League (PL). What is different from MLB in the US is that the Central league attracts many more fans than the Pacific league.

Why?

Well, there is a team called the Yomiuri Giants that belongs to the Central league - the prestigious, rich, popular, Tokyo-based team that has tons of high-paid stars, and has won more championships than any other team (now you see why I call them the "evil empire"). Hideki "Godzilla" Matsui (now with the New York Yankees) played for them. And he was - and still is - a national hero.

The financially troubled Osaka-based Pacific League (PL) team called Kintetsu Buffaloes (Hideo Nomo, LA Dodgers, played for them) made a big announcement in June. They are going to merge with Orix BlueWave, (Ichiro's and Shige Hasegawa's - both now with the Seattle Mariners - former team).

When a six team league goes to five teams, there will be problems with scheduling. Because of this, the PL is said to be considering merging two more teams into one. Two less teams means about 140 registered players will lose jobs (including minor players). Players don't want that.

If this strike happens, this will be the first ever strike in the Japanese baseball history.

If you own a Pacific league team, you can't compete. Yomiuri owner, George-Steinbrenner-like Tsuneo Watanabe refused to have inter-league games. Though he is reported to have resigned last month, he just recently suggested moving the Giants to the PL, sending all CL team owners into a panic.

It is interesting that the association is demanding not only that the Orix-Kintetsu merger be reconsidered but also requesting to revamp the draft system and reassess the broadcasting revenue-sharing methods.

Well, my dad and I didn't come up with a solution, but we agreed that something needs to change in Japanese baseball. When one team gets much more rich off the TV rights, attracting high-paid players and still gets good players with complicated, unclear draft rules, something is wrong. I hope there will be no strike, but they may not be able to avoid it.

Oh well, maybe my Dragons will win it all this year anyway.

The Major League Baseball's trading deadline is quickly approaching, which means it is rumor time. There was one rumor that our own NOMAH — that's Boston Red Sox shortstop Nomar Garciaparra for all you non-Sox fans — was possibly going to the Chicago Cubs (and veteran pitcher Randy Johnson coming to the Sox... which will not happen). My friend says "Nomar will love it there. Just look at Steve Bartman! Cubs fans already have forgiven him!" I disagree. There is no way Cubs fans will forget or forgive Steve Bartman. The Cubs missed the World Series by just one game last year, some say because of Bartman's dropped foul ball. The team holds the longest World Series appearance (1945) AND crown (1908) drought in all the Major League Baseball. How can you forget that?

But I had a chance to catch up with a born-and-bred Cubs fan, — and former resident of the North side of Chicago — my friend Ed. So I asked him if he has forgiven Bartman.

To my surprise, his reply was: "I think some people have. I know I have."

"I blame the Cubs players for falling apart after that. It was just a foul ball, and anybody would have tried to catch it. After that happened, there were still two strikes on the batter, and the Cubs were still winning 3-0. [Manager] Dusty Baker should have gone out to talk to [pitcher Mark] Prior and settle him down."

I know people in Boston have definitely not forgiven former manager Grady Little for leaving star pitcher Pedro Martinez in Game 7 of last season's ALCS after his arm was obviously getting tired. To this day, some can not stand the mention of the name "Grady Little," which is really too bad. I liked the guy, he led us in two very good seasons - that was just one game. It's not just Little, Red Sox fans still have a grudge with Bill Buckner for his costly error in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series with the Mets, and that was 18 years ago(!). What's more, "Red Sox Nation" still hasn't forgotten Darrell Johnson for taking out Jim Willoughby in 1975 Series against the Reds, Joe McCarthy for starting Denny Galehouse in the one-game 1948 pennant playoff against the Indians, or Johnny Pesky for holding the ball in 1946 Series. The