Baseball

It has been a walk down memory lane for the Baltimore Orioles this week as Interleague play has allowed for the renewal of a great rivalries with two one-time World Series opponents.

To begin this column, I’d like to extend a heartfelt sympathy to Russell Branyan, Jose Lopez and Rob Johnson, who have all been impacted by family illness or death in recent days.

On Thursday, the Chicago Cubs offense dragged itself from the grave to score four runs on back-to-back home runs from Derrek Lee and Geovany Soto against their crosstown rival White Sox and eventually won on a walk-off single in the ninth inning.

On Friday, the offense took six innings off again, only to rally back from what started as a 7-0 deficit to the visiting Cleveland Indians. The Cubs scored four runs in the eighth inning before, in a moment of poetic injustice, longtime Cubs hero Kerry Wood was taken out of the yard by Lee to tie the game in the ninth inning.

Far be it from me not to value and understand the importance of education. After all, I have a law degree and I’m a practicing lawyer with my own business.

Like most people who write about sports, I also played sports growing up and in high school. And like most people who love sports, if I were good enough to play a sport (any sport) professionally, I would have.

And like most people, if I was so super talented that I was good enough to turn professional at age 18, guess what, I would have.

There are surprises like "I have a surprise for you," and surprises that come totally out of the blue.  The day my step-dad brought home the satellite dish fell into the latter category.

Anyone familiar with rural areas has seen them.  Not these modern day, small puppies that don rooftops and have monthly bills.

All channels were free on the old-school big boys!  That meant, well, everything imaginable—every cable channel from every cable TV provider. 

On June 17th, the Seattle Mariners called up 23-year-old first baseman Mike Carp from Triple-A Tacoma. He is taking the roster spot of LHP Erik Bedard, who was placed on the disabled list with shoulder inflammation.

Ted Giannoulas, the man behind the chicken costume, may be hanging up his beak for good.

What the cluck?

The Chicken is baseball’s best-known mascot, and perhaps the most famous in all of sports.

Some have confused The Famous Chicken as the mascot of the Padres. Although he does make appearances occasionally at San Diego sporting events, he has never been the official mascot of any San Diego sports team.

So we're nearing the midpoint of the season, and you know what that means.......THE MLB ALL-STAR GAME IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER.

Here are my picks for the NL, position by position, making sure to include at least 1 representative from each team:

C -- Brian McCann, Yadier Molina.  Molina makes it more for his defense, but his offense has been pretty good too.  Disappointing to see how far Geo Soto and Russell Martin have fallen since last year....

Former Major League pitcher Shawn Estes has retired today.

Estes was acquired in 2001 from the San Francisco Giants for outfielder Tsuyoshi Shinjo and infielder Desi Relaford. In one season with the Mets, Estes went 4-9 with a 4.55 ERA. His best year came in 1997 when he won 19 games with the Giants while pitching his way to a 3.18 ERA. Although Estes never regained that great form in his career again, he went on to win 101 games.

This article was originally published at fantasypros911.com.