FanHouse KazMatsui

Starting Five is our wrapup of the previous day's baseball action, with a quick nod to what is ahead.

You Oughta Know ...
That David Ortiz pulled within one homer of Yovanni Gallardo on the MLB leaderboard. Yes, Big Papi finally hit a home run. It took him 149 at-bats to get his first homer of the season, while 318 other players had hit at least one -- including two by Gallardo, a Brewers pitcher -- but Ortiz got on the board with a fifth-inning homer, helping the Sox to a victory over Toronto.

Ortiz had been slumping so badly that manager Terry Francona benched him for the whole series last weekend in Seattle. Ortiz joked after hitting the homer on Wednesday that he was so desperate he was "about to hit right-handed."

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MLB Power Rankings: Where MLB FanHouse's editors, writers and bloggers team up to break down the who's who and the what's what in the baseball world.

While it's entirely possible the Blue Jays do hit a snag, isn't it about time columnists across the internet stopped doing Can the Blue Jays Really Keep This Up? pieces by now? I've seen at least 10 in the past three weeks. There are almost as many The Rangers Are For Real posts. The discrepancy in the media's faith in those two is likely due to the divisions in which the teams reside, but seven weeks isn't a small sample. At some point, you have to start giving credit where it's due.

Just as Knox posted his results from our recent FanHouse draft, I'll throw mine on here, too, for your critiques. Mr. Bardeen laid out the league format here. Year 101 is my team name, as you can see from the title to this piece, and it has a little something to do with my favorite baby bears.

Somehow, I ended up with the top pick in the draft. I haven't had this happen to me in years. Honestly, I can't remember the last time I picked first in fantasy baseball or football. Well, I'd been preaching -- since A-Rod fell injured -- what to do with the top choice. I had to put my money where my mouth was.

As we'll preach time and again at FanHouse, compiling a successful fantasy baseball team isn't about the most productive players. It's about what players give you the most value. Carlos Quentin was much more valuable last season than Ryan Braun -- despite ending with slightly inferior numbers -- because of how much cheaper he was to attain than Braun.

The best way to compile a winning team is to recognize areas where you can maximize the value of your draft picks. Not spending high picks on closers is one way to do this. Finding players being underestimated is another. Another, still, is to find places lacking depth and grab a strength.

Fantasy baseball draft season is coming, so you best be prepared by delving through every major player on each team. Fantasy FanHouse is here to help with a quick once-over.

Meet the ...
Team who refuses to rebuild. Seriously, Drayton McLane, just keep holding out hope you can win the World Series and making your general managers deal every prospect you ever stumble across for the likes of Miguel Tejada and an overrated closer. It just keeps setting the franchise back years at a time. For now, they are solving a broken leg with a band-aid by winning 86 games and treading water.

From the Windup is FanHouse's daily, extended look at a particular portion of America's pastime.

A strange thing is happening in the National League wild-card race this year. The Brewers, who had a stranglehold on the race as recently as about a week ago, have fallen apart and opened the door up for a number of teams who seemed to be as good as done. One team who's had the door opened for them is the Houston Astros. They've spent most of the season well out of contention, but a well-timed hot streak has them contending, much like the Rockies did last year.

What makes this hot streak even more interesting is that the man behind it, general manager Ed Wade, has made a string of nearly inexplicable, almost indefensible, moves to try and improve the team. They are making a run at things, but it's been mostly lead by Lance Berkman, Roy Oswalt, and Ty Wigginton. All of them were Astros before Wade's hiring. What, exactly, is going on in Houston?

You know, this baseball season started out with some pretty odd, and no doubt, painful injuries. First we heard the tragic tale of Felix Pie and his twisted testicle, and that story was followed shortly with the epic battle between Kaz Matsui and the evil anal fissures.

Since then, though, we've had nothing but the same old boring hamstring and sore shoulder injuries. That is until Jim Leyland explained the problems his third baseman Carlos Guillen has been having after he committed two errors on Tuesday night.

"He can hardly move -- he's got hemorrhoids so bad," Tigers manager Jim Leyland said Tuesday. "He's been playing with hemorrhoids that probably need to be lanced. He probably shouldn't have been out there (third base on Monday)."

Leyland said the hemorrhoids have been bothering Guillen for about four or five days, but they have gotten worse in the last few days. "He could hardly walk (Monday night)," Leyland said.

And with that, we now know more about Carlos' ass than I think we ever hoped to. Thanks, Jim.

I've never had hemorrhoids myself, so I can't say for sure how painful they actually are, but anytime you need to have anything lanced, it doesn't sound like much fun. Looking on the bright side, maybe Guillen can spin this whole thing into an endorsement for Preparation H. "Hello, I'm Detroit Tigers third baseman Carlos Guillen, and when I play baseball I like to make sure my butt feels nice. Sitting on that hard wooden bench between innings can really tear a man's booty up, and that's why I never come to the ballpark without my Preparation H with cooling gel."

The commercial would then show Carlos hitting a home run and as he crosses the plate to high five his teammates, he gets a slap on the ass from Ivan Rodriguez before turning towards the camera, flashing a smile, winking, and giving a thumbs up.

Seeing Kaz Matsui batting lead-off gives me kind of a conflicted feeling. On one hand, I'm happy he's past his horrific off-season injury and I don't have to think about it any more. On the other hand? Why the hell is a guy with a .304 OBP this year and a .324 career mark leading off? Luckily, Cecil Cooper is more than happy to explain to the Houston Chronicle:

"I like Matsui's game, period," Cooper said. "He makes the pitcher work. He's not one of those one-, two-pitch out guys. If you take all his at-bats and total them out, he makes the guys throw strikes. We saw that when we played against him last year.

"At that spot, he can still do the same things that Michael [Bourn] does. He can a steal base. He's a veteran, and this is Michael's first time going through (a prolonged slump). He's sometimes not sure of what he wants to do and how he wants to do it, and this takes the pressure off and lets him just hit and be himself."

Being my cynical self, I went to look up how Kaz Matsui does taking pitches because frankly, managers usually just say stuff like that to justify something that they're doing that no one else likes. Matsui's only played 11 games this year, but it is true that he's seeing 4.2 pitches per at-bat in those 11 games, which would put tie him for tenth in the National League. Career-wise, he's closer to 4.0 P/PA, which is still a decent number. Now if only he could use those pitches to get on base, I might think Cooper was on to something.

The other day, Lackey covered Kaz Matsui's "ongoing problem with hemorrhoids," which, on the scale of unnecessary disclosures, ranks somewhere up there with the details of a soon-to-be-former New York governor's paid-sex preferences. The hemorrhoids were bad enough. So let's take it a step further! Today the Houston Chronicle (via BBTF) informs that Matsui is expected to miss four or five days with a condition known as "anal fissure."

Yes, that's every bit as bad as it sounds:

An anal fissure is an unnatural crack or tear in the anus skin. As a fissure, these tiny tears may show as bright red rectal bleeding and cause severe periodic pain after defecation. [...] Most anal fissures are caused by stretching of the anal mucosa beyond its capability. Various causes of this fissure include:

* Straining to defecate, especially if the stool is hard and dry
* Severe and chronic constipation
* Severe and chronic diarrhea
* Crohn's disease and Ulcerative colitis
* Tight sphincter muscles
* Anal intercourse

On three: OW. Poor Kaz. This is almost worse than Felix Pie's twisted testicle. Almost.

As spring training injuries go, there's always plenty of cases of dead arm and strained muscles and sprained ankles and the like as out-of-shape athletes try to round their way into playing condition for the start of the games in April. There are an unlucky few, however, that have to deal with things far worse than your typical spring fare. Felix Pie certainly comes to mind in this category, and now he's got an unfortunate companion. I came across the following passage describing Kaz Matsui's spring struggles in the Houston Chronicle:

Second baseman Kaz Matsui will visit a specialist in Houston today to discuss a course of treatment for an ongoing problem with hemorrhoids.

Not just hemorrhoids ... an ongoing problem with hemorrhoids.

I want to laugh, but I feel pretty bad for Kaz. On top of the discomfort that he must be in, I'm sure his teammates are going to be giving him a hard time it when he gets back from the specialist. I mean, how often does a baseball player go out with a hemorrhoid problem? This seems as weird to me as the time Ozzie Smith missed a bunch of games with chicken pox.