Lance Berkman has been out injured for the last several days and will be back in the game soon, he hopes. He hurt hit arm taking too many swings in the batting cage recently and he has been diagnosed with bicep tendinitis. This is good news for the Astros, who really need to have their slugger at the plate whenever they possibly can. They don’t seem to have that much otherwise available for them, but as long as Berkman is ready to go, they have at least a fighting chance. The season begins soon and then we’ll know for sure who is actually dominant.

Curt Schilling has had a great career in the MLB. He has been dominant with the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Boston Red Sox, winning several championships with those clubs. In 2001, he was co-MVP of the World Series with Randy Johnson. Johnson still pitches, but not as much. Schilling, 42, is done with the major leagues though. He’s worked hard, he’s tired, and he’s been pretty injured for the last several years. Last year, he missed most of the year after shoulder surgery. Similarly, he missed a big part of the 2007 season. He’s had a rough couple of years. He is happy to retire after having worked hard and pitched so well over the last decade or so. He had power that is hard to believe. Congrats to him and we wish him well.

Manny Ramirez has some interesting promotional work that he’s going right now and it’s one of the lesser known things. Usually you’d expect him to be promoted while playing baseball, but in this case, he decided to take some swings at cricket to promote a cable subscription. He was moderately successful; I think the way of hitting isn’t that much different because it’s just eye hand coordination. He asked to see several different kinds of hits and joked that he might want to sign with one of the cricket teams in the world. It was an funny thing for the preseason. We can play, but not quite yet. There are a lot of different kinds of fun things going on, before the real baseball fun begins in a couple weeks.

Ken Griffey Jr will be playing for Seattle in Left Field which is the first time he’s played there since 2002 and he’s never played there on a regular basis. This will present some problems for him, but it will also be an interesting way for the game to be played for him. He’s shown remarkable abilities in his flexibility over the course of the last few years and he can easily learn a new position. But there are some real problems for him, including injuries and a generalized slowdown in his game. Perhaps he was just a bit unsettled last year in Chicago, but hopefully Seattle will get something better this season. Good luck to them!

Baseball is my favorite sport. We love the smell of the grass and the nice warm weather that there is for each game. I was listening to a game the other day on the radio and I could just feel the warm weather come right over me and the sun got a little bit warmer. Maybe it was only 30 degrees here, but most places will get much warmer by the time opening day comes around. And then comes the real summer. I just like the feeling of sitting at the baseball game with a friend of mine, drinking some lemonade and having some kind of funnel-cake or something like that. Maybe the team isn’t going to win, maybe they will. Perhaps the team will have trouble at the beginning but then they will get better. But what we like are the batters, the pitchers, the feel of the place. Anyway, it’s only a few weeks away!

We wrote about A-Rod just a week or two ago, but he’s back in the MLB news. Recently, it was reported that he had hip problems. The news had been that he was going to be out for awhile, then it had been that he was going to get surgery, and then that he was just going to play right through it. Well, he just decided this weekend that he was going to get the hip surgery after all and that he would do well to take some time away. This has a two-part benefit for him. Number one, he can actually get the surgery and heal up before he comes back, avoiding accidentally hurting himself more. Number two, it will give the news sometime to forget about the steroids-issue that he has been having for a month or two. Hopefully he’ll have a speedy recovery. Now, back to real baseball discussion.

The Toronto Blue Jays are aiming to start an exciting new season. Last year was a tough year for them. Within their division, they played quite well at 37-35. But then they went on to have difficulty with individual players throughout the season. Several players who were supposed to do well ended up underperforming or injured for a long part of the season. However, Cito Gaston was brought back for the second part of the season and brought the team back to over .500 on the year, so perhaps this team is on the upswing again. Starter Dustin McGowan will be coming back from his shoulder surgery in May, so he might get plugged into the rotation at that point. It’s not clear how this team will be doing in a few months, but it will be interesting to see.

If you are a super baseball fan, you will be tracking the World Baseball Classic in the next few weeks. This is a tournament where many different countries field a baseball team and try to win a world championship during the the tournament. They are going to be having a great time, that’s for sure, but it’s also a tough battle. With the US only putting in a few major leaguers, there are plenty of other worthy teams. Latin American teams and Japan often put forward impressive teams. It’s going to be a pretty interesting tournament but we’ll just have to see.