FanHouse LukeAppling

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

You Oughta Know ...
That the Marlins have had an interesting opening three weeks. After Sunday's 13-2 loss to the Phillies, which was so ugly that outfielder Cody Ross pitched the ninth inning, the Fish have dropped six in a row. That came immediately after they started 11-1.

Which is the real team? Most, likely neither.

"We're not an 11-1 team, and we're not an 0-6 team -- we're somewhere in the middle," manager Fredi Gonzalez said.

So now the Marlins are 11-7, having scored 93 runs and allowed 89 runs. That type of run production ought to leave them at a little over .500, which is where many prognosticators figured they'd be when the season began.

Major League Baseball's favorite punctuation mark has long been the asterisk. Roger Maris got one when he broke Babe Ruth's record and you might have heard that Barry Bonds' 756th home run ball will be emblazoned with one before it heads to Cooperstown. There will probably be more to come as the juiced up stars of recent years set marks. How then, amid all this asterisk-mania, did Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak avoid getting the treatment?

That question is being asked by a Canadian magazine called Walrus and they've uncovered a fair bit of evidence that suggests DiMag's streak may not be free from controversy. It's not because of anything Joltin' Joe did or took but because the official scorer for his home games was Dan Daniel.

Daniel was a local sportswriter who would today be considered something closer to a PR man. He was friends with the players, traveled with the team and had his expenses paid for by the Yankees. He was also the sole decider on hits and errors at Yankee Stadium and serving his team and friends may have trumped his objectivity according to the article's author David Robbeson.