NL West

To celebrate my father’s 70th birthday, I decided to take him to an Arizona Diamondbacks game.

Regular readers of this blog may wonder whether this was really a birthday gift, or whether I just forget to go shopping and decided to pick up a few extra tickets to the game while I was there.

As strange as it sounds, I actually planned this gift.

When I was growing up, my father, like many others throughout this country, gave up his time to coach Little League baseball. It was not just to spend more time with his son.

The Arizona Diamondbacks are once again partnering with Fry’s Foods as part of their Fan Loyalty program. Fans that have a Fry’s Rewards card can scan their card at each Diamondbacks game and receive five points for attending.

You can receive additional points for each dollar you spend at Fry’s Foods purchasing specific grocery items. After accumulating points you can trade them in for prizes that range from Diamondbacks merchandise to autographed memorabilia to baseball experiences.

After last night's seven-inning, 10-strikeout performance against the Padres, Jonathan Sanchez has caught the attention of the baseball nation once again.

Not only is Sanchez ready to break out (as I hinted this offseason), he is already on his way to doing so.

The San Francisco Giants are stranded in one of those offensive deserts where the run-scoring oases are replaced by shimmering mirages of runners in scoring position that dissolve into nothing.

Hey, it was gonna happen sooner or later—this is not a team capable of winning 100 games.

Those kinds of clubs have exceptional hitting to complement the same kind of arms.

While these Giants have the pitching part of that equation, even the improved offense is still mediocre (and that's being charitable).

Usually when a team puts up 10 runs in a baseball game it is cause for celebration. Especially when that team has been struggling to score runs over the previous week.

Conor Jackson has always intrigued me. He looks and sounds like a guy who should hit .320 with 30 home runs and be an All-Star every year.

Unfortunately, he is a guy who hits about .285 with 15 home runs every year. Which, if you consider it, isn’t all that bad.

But the issue now with Jackson isn’t his productivity on the field, it’s the fact that he can’t stay on the field. Jackson missed all but 30 games last year because of Valley Fever Virus.

When Aaron Cook struggled in spring training, it was chalked up to a veteran working on his pitches. When he struggled in the first two starts of the season, it was chalked up to a sinker-ball pitcher needing to get into a rhythm.

For every Phil Mickelson Masters moment that fuels our optimism and confirms that the sporting fates have a firm sense of morality, there are at least as many examples of the contrary. Episodes where Lady Luck jilts the White Knight, and instead shacks up with the leather-clad Lothario that plays by nobody's rules.

Not even his own.

(Bonus points if you recognize that bit of hybrid pilferage).

Case in point of this latter blight would be the San Francisco Giants' three-game series with the Los Angeles Dodgers that just concluded on Sunday.

In a move that should surprise no one, Major League Baseball announced today that Ubaldo Jimenez is the player of the week for the National League.

There are two really, really scary plays in baseball. The first being when a batter hits a line drive at the pitchers head and the second being when a pitcher hits a batter in the head with a fastball.

The later happened when Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Vicente Padilla drilled San Francisco Giants center fielder Aaron Rowand in the head in the fifth inning of their game Friday night. The pitch resulted in Rowand suffering a minor concussion and two small fractures in his left cheekbone.