BlogBall08, Pope Benedict and Awesome Religious Tolerance in the New York Mets Outfield

I’ve got one of the twelve teams in BlogBall08, the fantasy baseball league for education bloggers engineered so charitably by the gent of Dangerously Irrelevant fame. We’re in Week 2 and my Huskies are doing well [7W-3L].

I opted not to rank my players before the draft. You know, teachers and admins constantly mention, in ways ranging from common sense realism to shameless excuse-making, that they have no control over the kids they get. How, then, could an education blogger pre-rank a fantasy team? Psh. I’m doing this one underperforming-public-school-style.

The Huskies are a fairly balanced team, and I think I can take my MLB raw materials and make the playoffs. We’ll see whether amateur sabermetrics can triumph; hopefully my competition are practitioners of CaseyBall. If being able to pluck Brian Bannister [son of 15-year "I got too many of his baseball cards in the 1980s" pitcher Floyd Bannister] off the Free Agent wire is any indication of how this season will go, I’m in fine shape.

And now on to the rest of the post’s title.

I was checking to see how two of my kiddies did in the Phillies/Mets game when I saw the Metsies’ box score. The important parts are denoted by a red dot:

Ryan Church, right field. Angel Pagan, left field.

It’s almost like the Mets are on extra-super-good behavior while we receive the Pope. And like Pope Benedict’s speech, that box score is awesome.