Opening Day Flotsam and Jetsam

Miscellaneous baseball thoughts and observations.

The Braves were 4-14 last season against Philadelphia but the strange thing is that they were 0-9 at home at Turner Field and 4-5 up at Citizens Bank Park... Jermaine Dye needs just 2 HR for 300 career and just 9 RBI for 1000 career. I forget that Dye started his career with the Braves. Cliff Claven would say the answer is six guys who have never been in my kitchen but the thing these six players have in common - Keith Lockhart and Michael Tucker, Neifi Perez, Todd Belitz, Mario Encarnacion and Jose Ortiz - is that they were all traded for Dye in three separate trades... Tim Wakefield and Pedro Martinez both have exactly 400 career starts... I read an interesting point over at Baseball Musings over whether the Mets signing of Gary Sheffield might cause a rift “between Wright and those players who might be replaced by Sheffield or sent down to the minors to make way for him.” Fernando Tatis is up there in age (34) and is just making $1.7 million this year. Sheffield could take at bats and by extension money off his family's table. Ryan Church and Daniel Murphy are both lefties. It is Tatis who is the right handed bat Sheffield will be replacing for the most part. The devil in me hopes that Tatis cold-clocks Sheffield in a locker room brawl ... I'm glad Kris Benson made the Rangers. I've sorta missed seeing pictures of Anna Benson every once and a while...