Baseball Flotsam and Jetsam

Miscellaneous baseball thoughts and observations.

Going into Thursday's game - no Oriole player was batting above .250. I like to call that "the Kevin Millar effect". However, last night Miguel Tejada and Jay Gibbons went 2-3 and 3-5 respectively to bounce over the Millar line (for the time being)... Don't overlook the great start of Angels pitcher John Lackey who is 2-0 with a 0.75 ERA. Lackey starts tonight against the Red Sox which means Boston gets Felix Hernandez and now John Lackey back-to-back. That's enough to maybe put any offense into a slump... One player I'm rooting for is pitcher Chris Sampson of the Astros. Sampson, who turns 29 in May, started out as a shortstop but didn't get higher than Single A ball and after the 1999 season he quit pro baseball completely because he realized he couldn't hit big league pitching. The next three years he helped coach a community college and by throwing batting practice - he realized he had a pretty good arm. The Astros gave him a shot as a pitcher and he's made the most of it. So far he's 1-0 in one start for the Astros without giving up an earned run in 8-innings... Talk about bad luck. Dan Haren is 0-2 despite having an ERA of 0.69 and only giving up 1 earned run in two starts (there were 5 additional unearned runs in his starts). Here's hoping he has better luck against the Yankees tonight... Angels fans have been waiting for Casey Kotchman to be the player he was projected to be and a good sign that he may have finally figured out big league pitching is the fact that he's only struck out once in 31 AB this season. Prior to this year Kotchman would strike out at least once every 10 AB. Now he just has to show that he can hit lefties...