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Admit it, even though you were kind of giddy when Ruben Amaro picked Roy Oswalt from Ed Wade’s pocket at the trade deadline, you still weren’t sure that the Phillies new No. 2 starter belonged in any discussions of the league’s top pitchers. After all, discussions of baseball’s top arms usually includes names like Sabathia, Halladay, Wainwright, and of course, Lee.

Two games...that was two games.

The Rockies just dropped one of the most emotionally exhausting games I’ve ever seen, 12-11. Hey, it’s football season, so I guess they needed to have a football game score.

The big number now is 6.5 games. If the Rockies had won, it would have been 4.5 games. That’s how big it is to play the team currently in the lead of the National League wild-card race, the Philadelphia Phillies.

I was at the Mets game on Monday and sat for the first time in the left field reserved seats.  It was the bottom of the eighth and the Mets were down 3-1;  there had to be only about 4,000 people left in the entire stadium at this point because of the unbearable cold. 

For the entirety of the San Francisco Giants 2010 season, there has been an air of inconsistency that can only be described as Duane Kuiper has: torture. 

The team itself had a real good April (.591) followed by a .500 May, a sub-par June (.481), a torrid July (.714), and a dismal August (.464). 

This is the team that scored one run in three games against Oakland in May and then scored 11 runs in three straight games against the Reds in August. 

It was no less than Tom Seaver—”Tom Terrific”—who went to extraordinary lengths to protect his right arm, which he astutely realized was nothing more than his livelihood.

Seaver, while traveling as a player, wouldn’t carry any of his luggage with his right appendage. In fact, he tried mightily to do nothing with his right arm other than hurl baseballs at 90+ mph toward enemy hitters.

The Pittsburgh Pirates did win the season series against the Chicago Cubs, but the final series, in Wrigley Field, left a bad taste in the mouth, losing two out of three on the road.

Actually, the Chicago Cubs are one of two teams that the Bucs have beaten (5-4) on the road this season. The other one is the Colorado Rockies (2-1). (Although they barely managed a 2-2 tie in PNC Park.)

A good number of predictions have the Cubs going out into free agency and trying to buy their way into a title, as they did after the abysmal 2006. There are a lot of similarities: managerial vacancy, terrible record, and obvious holes to be filled.

However, one obvious thing is different from now and then: prospects. Lots and lots of prospects. The Cubs can reasonably fill all the holes they have now with up-and-coming players, rather than spending themselves into a budget nightmare (see: Soriano, Alfonso).

As the minor league season comes to a close, it’s time to start looking at each organization and determine who is the team’s Fantasy Baseball Minor League Player of the Year.

First, the criteria:

One of the more annoying aspects of 21st century baseball fandom has come by way of the dreaded stat geek.

You probably think I'm going down the route of "The RBI is the only stat that matters", "VORP is only for loners and dudes who really hate the Discovery Channel", or some other get-off-my-lawn type rant, but you'd be mistaken.

Jerry Manuel gets criticized for many of the Mets' issues on and off the field. Fans get on him for his in-game decisions, which at times is deserved. But what I ask here is that the Mets give Jerry Manuel the opportunity he is owed to manage the team in 2011.