Find me and follow me
Through corridors, refectories and files
You must follow
Leave this academic factory
You will find me in the matinee

I was feeling silly this morning, so I stuck together a couple of All-Star collages to decorate my computer desktop, and I figured I'd share them. The first one is of Shea Hillenbrand:

At noontime on Saturday a small crowd of baseball enthusiasts gathered in the theatre of the SkyDome for a book talk by Alan Schwarz. The crowd was diverse, ranging from SABR members to a man with his two young children to a Blue Jays employee who is also attending the 34th Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) convention. Schwarz’s book talk was sponsored by the Learning Annex and centered on his acclaimed book The Numbers Game. Schwarz also writes a weekly column for www.espn.com, a biweekly article for The New York Times and is a senior writer for Baseball America. The Numbers Game was his first book and received much acclaim, as it was named the best baseball book in 2004 and nominated for the 2004 Dave Moore Award, handed out by SABR to the “most important book on baseball” published in that year. It has recently been released in paperback.

The boys representing the Canadian club ruined Independence Day in four American cities, as the full season clubs registered wins. And, this being the first Tuesday of the month, it’s time for a Three-Star update.

Your intrepid Syracuse correspondent is on vacation so I am preparing the month end review four days in advance, as Mike Myers would say: "Talk amongst yourselves. June was a good month for the Chiefs, discuss."

Now the rooms are all empty down at Frankie's joint
And the highway she's deserted down to Breaker's Point
There's a lot of people leaving town now
Leaving their friends, their homes
At night they walk that dark and dusty highway all alone

It's become a tradition every time the Blue Jays defeat the Red Sox, except this one features a special appearance by Scott Schoeneweis in a starring role.

The timing will never be better. Last night, the Dodgers lost outfielder J.D. Drew for 6 to 8 weeks after a Brad Halsey pitch broke Drew's left wrist. The injury is just the latest to plague the Dodgers, who still don't know when they're getting Milton Bradley back from a finger injury.

Though it's a Monday off for those of us south of the border (or north, if you live in Windsor or certain places in the Yukon), there is no rest for this Canadian, as we had our day of holi on Friday.

A 3-3 record for the affiliates last night and yesterday afternoon. Why isn't it "last afternoon"?

The surprise team of the season is threatening to run away and hide.

I know, it's not really fair -- Rob went and put together that awfully nice effort of an All-Canada Day team by using the names of the delegates at the Québec Conference of 1864, and thusly found himself stuck with source names like Chapais, Tache and Haviland -- not exactly the kinds of names you find littered throughout major league baseball history.

So it's not really a fair fight against a July 4th U.S. Independence Day squad where we find signers of the Declaration of Independence named Morris, Johnson, Clark, Lee and Williams. One suspects the American July holiday team may be a bit deeper than those "Canada Day Trippers" Rob came up with.

But before we skip to the inevitable shellacking, let's find out for sure ...

Roy Halladay and Shea Hillenbrand will represent the Blue Jays at the All Star game next week.

Roy Halladay showed Terry Francona who should be starting the All-Star Game. Nothing wrong with taking 2 of 3 from the defending champs in their own house, even if the ninth inning got a little tense there. A little?

Welcome to a new kind of tension
All across the idiot nation
Everything isn't meant to be OK

Time for the audit
The gathering trial
A collectors dilemma
Repositioned and filed