Night Owl Cards

Thousands of names fill the major league baseball archives. With the sheer volume of players who have competed in baseball for the last 140 or so years, there are bound to be names that repeat. Not just Smith and Jones, but less common ones like Darwin, Hampton and Moreland. Since baseball is a family game, the same names pop up all the time. Bell. Boone. Canseco. But have you noticed that every once in awhile, a couple of players show up at around the same time with the same name and they aren't related? In fact, you may have never heard the name previously, at least not in a major league setting. There are two players with the last name Cain in baseball right now -- Matt and Lorenzo (yes, I know Matt hasn't played a game this year). They've each played together in major league baseball for the last five years, after there were just three previous Cains spread out over 125 years of baseball. There are lots of other examples of this, and sometimes I wonder how it h...

I was watching one of those ESPN-marred baseball games a couple of weeks ago. You know, the ones where ESPN feels the need to divide the game into "themes," and talk about them, whether they're related to the game or not. I think the game was around the trade deadline because broadcaster Rick Sutcliffe started discussing Orlando Cabrera. Cabrera had been traded from the Indians, who are in a pennant race, to the Giants, who are also in a pennant race. I don't remember exactly what Sutcliffe said about Cabrera, but I do know that I winced because he said something like this: "Do you know why Cabrera is always on winning teams? Because he's a winner . He knows how to win." Perfect. He wouldn't be Rick Sutcliffe if he didn't say something like that. But as usual, I was left to figure out for myself why Cabrera is a winner, and whether the fact that Cabrera has played in the postseason for five different teams is a byproduct of Cabrera bei...