Rankings/List

Happy Canada Day to all!

For most Americans, Canada is the wilderness to our north, a place of moose and mounties. But in more recent times, Canada has also been a hotbed of baseball talent, giving us a Hall of Famer pitcher in Ferguson Jenkins and some great sluggers, like Larry Walker.

Today, Canadian ballplayers are some of the headliners on MVP ballots, Cy Young races, and could one day see Hall of Fame consideration. Who is the most talented Canadian major leaguer today?

When a town's citizen receives the call to the Bigs, his hometown usually goes crazy.

He gets a parade, streets are named after him, the whole deal.

But what happens when the local neighborhood kid is playing for the local favorite team? Everyone goes crazy.

The standard for a hometown hero was set long ago, when Lou Gehrig, a young man from the Yorkville neighborhood of New York City, began his career with the New York Yankees.

The Major League Baseball trade deadline is a month away and already teams are getting themselves in position to acquire a big talent that can help push their team to the postseason.

Often times the object of a team's desire is a player who will be on the free agent market the following fall. Those trades are especially risky given all the factors that go into the deal. There are are examples of the rental deals working out (Carlos Beltran to the Astros), but the team must take a calculated risk.

How tall do you have to be to ride the rides at the ballpark? Being tall doesn't hurt, but it is certainly no requirement.

In 1999 and 2000, Pedro Martinez and Randy Johnson had the honor of standing next to each other as they accepted their Cy Young Award trophies. The vision of the two of them standing together conjured notions of some big time Texas rancher, and the little latino boy he hired to help clear the brush.

But more to the point, Pedro and Randy stood in direct contrast to one another: Randy was there to remind everyone that taller is better with major league pitchers.

Tomorrow, we turn our calendars to July. The start of the seventh Gregorian month isn't the precise midway point of the MLB season, but it's a symbolic transition, one that causes fans to say, "Wow, only three months left!"

Even if it's not precisely the halfway point, it's still a great time to start thinking about individual awards. Last week, Bleacher Report's Featured Columnists kicked off the celebration with Cy Young voting for both the AL and the NL.

And so, this week, we put on a mock MVP vote.

With the Midsummer Classic just around the corner, now is as good a time as any to take a look back at some of the most impressive performances in the history of the All-Star Game.

I have to emphasize the performance part of this, as this is not a list of the most memorable moments in the game's history. If it were, you would no doubt find the Randy Johnson vs. John Kruk matchup on the list, but alas, it is not.

So here are the 10 best performances in MLB All-Star Game history.

What if MLB followed the NHL’s lead and set-up its All-Star game using the North America vs. the World format…or in baseball’s case Latin America vs. the World?

As baseball’s reach extends further throughout the world, the idea of Latin American competing with the best from around the globe seems increasingly likely.

Could Latin America hold it’s own against the best from the United States, Japan, Canada, and anywhere else in between?

Headaches for fantasy owners were the result of their poor production. Their names are recognizable. Their pictures are likely one of your top current baseball cards. The bench might be the right place for them to think about what they did this week to so many hopeful fantasy baseball teams.

1) Jason Heyward, OF, Atlanta Braves

Heyward has made his way once again onto the slump report. He went only 1-for-16 and ended last week with a .062 AVG.

We all have a reason our favorite teams became our favorite teams. Some of us followed our fathers lead, and other looked for our own direction to spite'm! It could be a home town thing or maybe a player captured your heart.

I'm a sports fan. That maybe selling my addiction short. To take a phrase from my friend (sorry Derrick) I'm a fanatic. I follow teams with passion.

I intend on writing about each of my teams crossing over the sports I can't get enough of... describing the players that represent my teams in my eyes.

I'm starting with the New York Mets.

Last week was filled with laser shows from coast to coast. There were 14 players who hit three or more home runs last week. There were a lot of hot streaks going on. But these few players stood out as the studs of Week 12.