Night Owl Cards

The television and the computer are very important to my baseball-following existence. I don't live close to a major league stadium. The nearest ones are an all-day drive away, which would actually be a three-day journey -- one day for the trip down, one to watch the game and one for the trip back. I'm not 20 anymore. I'm not jamming all that into one day. And the one team that I live and die for is all the way on the other side of the country, thank you very much Walter O'Malley. So, even with modern amenities, my ability to follow my favorite team is somewhat limited. Therefore, I am the perfect candidate for MLB Extra Innings. It has Night Owl bleeding blue all over it. But I can't afford it. I have a mortgage and a family and a car that suddenly needs brake work. I try to reconcile daily the amount of money I spend on rectangular photographs of ballplayers. I don't need to do that in two different areas. And that is why the Free Preview of the M...

In all the buzz this week over the Dodgers acquiring Jim Thome and Jon Garland (how about that pitching performance last night, D-Back fans?), perhaps not enough has been said about one of the Dodgers' other recent acquisitions, Ronnie Belliard . I haven't paid much attention to Belliard's career, so it was a little bit of a surprise to see that he was a successful regular with both the Brewers and Indians. I thought he was nothing more than a sometimes-starter guy, but he's put up 169 hits in a season before, hit 48 doubles in 2004 and was once the Brewers' minor league player of the year. Got to pay more attention to those Midwest teams, I guess. Belliard came into focus much more during the 2006 postseason, when he played for another Midwest team, the Cardinals. He's a pretty solid hitter and can play a lot of positions, which is why the Dodgers dealt for him. So there is more to Belliard than the stupid corn rows (does he still have those?) and being a ...