Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was, in the immortal words and tone of John McLaughlin, WRONG! Wrong in his prediction about Bonds and number 756. Bonds didn’t homer, but the Nats’ 6 game winning streak is over. So, 756 watch continues…

So… Just so you all know… Your Maximum Leader is making a new prediction! Here tis:

Barry Bonds will hit home run 756 tonight off Mike Bacsik in the first inning with two men aboard and one out. Bonds will hit the third pitch he sees. The ball will go to deep center field where it will take an odd bounce off the ground behind the wall and fly back onto the field of play. It is a home run, and Washington player Austin Kearns will have 756 in his glove at the end of the play. Kearns will walk to the Giants dugout and give the ball to Bonds. The Nats will then come back to win the game.

There you have it. If this unlikely senario comes true, your Maximum Leader should buy a lottery ticket. Of course, if it doesn’t come true, then he’ll have to think of something more unlikely for tomorrow.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is going to share some thoughts he’s having about baseball. (Hence the title of this post… This post is, in no way, connected to the very fine website of the same name.)

Insofar as your Maximum Leader is concerned, it has been a good weekend for the national pastime. The Nationals have swept both the Red and the Cardinals and are now (for the time being) over .500 at RFK. The Nats have been playing good ball. They have been making hits and generating runs the old fashioned way. They have not be relying on the long ball to give them all their scoring. Your Maximum Leader likes to see balls hit into play. This is not to say that he doesn’t like seeing home runs (he does), but he likes seeing men thinking about how to run the bases. Your Maximum Leader would like to see the Nats finish above the Marlins in the NL East. It could happen. He’ll keep his fingers crossed.

Speaking of the Nationals… You may have heard that they are on the road now. In San Francisco. For four games. This means two things… First, your Maximum Leader will not be able to watch or listen to the whole game. The games will end way past his bedtime. Secondly, it means that it is likely that Barry Bonds will hit his record-breaking 756th career home run against a Nationals pitcher (thereby making that pitcher a footnote to history).

Here is the prediction. Barry Bonds will hit home run 756 tonight off John Lannan in the first inning with one man aboard and two outs. Bonds will hit the fourth pitch served up to him out. The ball will be caught by a fan standing between the outfield and McCovey Cove.

You can’t get much more precise than that when it comes to predictions dear minions…

All in all, your Maximum Leader will be happy for Barry Bonds when he hits 756. While your Maximum Leader isn’t sure that the career home run record is the “most hallowed” of all sporting records — it is right up there near the top. (To be frank, your Maximum Leader is partial to Joe DiMaggio’s most consecutive games with a hit record.) Regardless of what Barry Bonds may, or may not, have done he is a great ball player and has worked hard to claim the record for himself. Your Maximum Leader will not rehash the whole “did he or didn’t he” use performance enhancing drugs debate here. If you care to know, your Maximum Leader believes that Bonds probably has used performance enhancing drugs during his later career. Your Maximum Leader also believes that people in our justice system are innocent until proven guilty. Your Maximum Leader further believes that major league baseball, as a business entity, doesn’t give a rats arse if players use performance enhancing drugs. Regardless about what we see and hear about nowadays with all these investigations, baseball would prefer the negative attention to go away and just let players keep on doing whatever they were doing before the spotlight came on. We all know chicks dig the long ball and everyone pays to see offense (not a pitching duel).

Your Maximum Leader would like to see a controlled study about performance enhancing drugs and how much performance they enhance. Barry Bonds was a 40/40 man before there was any thought that he might be “on the juice.” It takes skills and talent to be a good ball player. You could pump up your Maximum Leader with all the substances in the world, and you couldn’t make a ball player out of him. Your Maximum Leader is not wholly convinced that being on some banned substance will substantially improve performance across the board. Your Maximum Leader is sure that steroids or HGH will make one stronger, but he isn’t sure that it will improve hand-eye coordination or make it possible for someone to hit the ball better. Indeed, your Maximum Leader isn’t too sure if being stronger always helps you hit the ball further. Making quality contact is the best way to get a hit. Your Maximum Leader suspects, but wouldn’t mind seeing serious study on the subject, that performance enhancing drugs might only marginally increase one’s hitting numbers. He could, and quite possibly is, wrong on this. But that is his hunch. Frankly, your Maximum Leader thinks that if there is an incentive for players to take banned drugs it is to shorten recovery time and enable them to play through minor injuries…

Anyhoo…

Your Maximum Leader was pleased to see Alex Rodriguez hit his 500th homer. That is a good milestone. We can speculate all we want about how A-Rod might be the one to break Barry Bond’s homer record. Your Maximum Leader, a few years ago, would have told you that the home-run king of baseball by 2007 was going to be Ken Griffey Jr. So see where that idle speculation gets you.

Your Maximum Leader was most interested in Tom Glavine’s 300th victory. He watched the game intently. Normally, your Maximum Leader would be rooting for the Cubs to take the Mets down, but last night was an exception. Although your Maximum Leader hadn’t considered it until it happened, he is inclined to believe the many commentators who say that it could be decaded before we see another 300 game winner — if we see one at all. With more teams (practically all of them) counting pitches, having bigger bullpens, and more men in the starting rotations (your Maximum Leader believes that he will see 6 man starting rotations before he dies) it seems statistically unlikely that there will be another 300 game winner for a long time. Your Maximum Leader doesn’t see Randy Johnson getting into the 300 club. And Johnson would be the most likely candidate. Your Maximum Leader doffs his bejeweled floppy cap to Tom Glavine on a job well done…

Your Maximum Leader will be watching the Nats v. Giants tonight (in High Definition no doubt) for a while… We’ll see if his prediction comes true.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader took his lovely daughters to the Washington Nationals v. Cincinnati Reds ballgame last night. The Nats beat the Reds 7-3 completing a three game sweep at RFK Stadium. It was Walter Johnson Night at the ballpark, and while the Nats’ Mike Bacsik didn’t look like Walter Johnson on the mound — Bacsik got the job done with the help of some good offense. Bacsik also helped his own cause with a nice double in the 4th that put him in a position to score later on a Belliard double later in the inning.

All in all it was a nice night at the ballpark. The worst part of the night was the drive home. Two (of three) lanes on 395 heading southbound to VA were closed for road work. Thus, your Maximum Leader took nearly an hour to just leave the District — a trip that might normally take 3-5 minutes in clear conditions.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader’s last post talked about Walter Johnson’s major league debut. In it he mentioned that he would like to see some footage of the Big Train pitching… Well… Thanks to the glories of You Tube he has this clip from “Baseball” by Ken Burns.

Sadly, your Maximum Leader must admit that he hasn’t seen all of the Burns film…

Your Maximum Leader is tipping his bejeweled floppy cap in memory of Walter Johnson.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is a baseball fan. He is a National League man, and now a fan of the Washington Nationals. (After many years of being an Atlanta Braves fan… You can only really be a fan for one team you know.) Your Maximum Leader also likes his history. He has, only in the past 5-10 years, become a fan of baseball history. He has always had a great admiration for Ty Cobb as a ball player. He’s also admired famed Senator’s pitcher Walter Johnson.

Your Maximum Leader was glad to see in today’s Washington Post a piece about the impending 100th anniversary of Johnson’s debut for the Senators. (That day was August 2, 1907.) Your Maximum Leader will share an excerpt from the Post piece that he particularly liked:

Ty Cobb later recounted the moment in his autobiography. “On Aug. 2, 1907, I encountered the most threatening sight I ever saw on a ballfield.”

Yet early that day, Cobb and the rest of the Detroit Tigers didn’t think much of Johnson as he warmed up for the second half of a doubleheader. The kid from Kansas was 19, had been pitching in a place called Weiser, Idaho, and was being rushed into the rotation of a last-place club by Manager Joe Cantillon. He had an unorthodox, slinging motion in which the ball seemed to come from behind his body. Cobb recalled that “we licked our lips” at the prospect of facing him.

“One of the Tigers imitated a cow mooing and we hollered at Cantillon: ‘Get the pitchfork ready, Joe — your hayseed’s on his way back to the barn,’ ” Cobb wrote.

They were wrong. Johnson didn’t win that day, leaving after eight innings in which he allowed six hits — three of them infield scratches — and two runs. When he was lifted for a pinch hitter in the eighth, he was headed for the first of his 279 losses. But he had left his mark.

J. Ed Grillo, covering the game for The Post, wrote: “Walter Johnson, the Idaho phenom, who made his debut in fast company yesterday, showed conclusively that he is perhaps the most promising young pitcher who has broken into a major league in recent years. . . . He had terrific speed, and the hard-hitting Detroit batsmen found him about as troublesome as any pitcher they have gone against on this present trip.”

Indeed, the Tigers were wowed. They were on their way to the American League pennant and had a fearsome lineup. But after they swept the doubleheader by beating Johnson in that second game, they knew they had seen a man who would be a rival for years.

“I watched him take that easy windup — and then something went past me that made me flinch,” Cobb said. “I hardly saw the pitch, but I heard it. The thing just hissed with danger. Every one of us knew we’d met the most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ballpark.”

That is a powerful endorsement from Cobb. “The most powerful arm ever turned loose in a ballpark.” Your Maximum Leader would love to find some film (if any exists) of Johnson pitching. He’d love to look over it and see the most powerful arm to throw a ball…

Your Maximum Leader might try and make it down to RFK to see the Nats play on “Walter Johnson Night.” The team will wear replica 1927 Senators caps in tribute to the man they called the Big Train.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was invited a little while ago by his friend Ted (of Rocket Jones fame) to participate in a new group blog he was starting. Ted, you see, had recently completed reading the “Dangerous Book for Boys.” So impressed by this book was Ted that he thought it would be a great idea to get some bloggers together to share bits of knowledge and life experience (or just trivia) in a way that would be educational and fun for parents and kids.

Now, for the sake of full disclosure, your Maximum Leader has not read “The Dangerous Book for Boys.” (But he has ordered it on Amazon and will likely get it in the mail pretty darn soon. (There is nothing like Super-saver shipping is there…) But he will trust Ted’s judgement that your Maximum Leader has something worthwhile to contribute to this worthy endeavour.

Without further adieu… Your Maximum Leader presents: The Dangerous and Daring Blog for Boys and Girls.

And since your Maximum Leader is plugging the new site, allow him to plug his first contribution to the Dangerous Blog… Without asking the Smallholder’s permission at all, your Maximum Leader went ahead and slapped down some editing on two of the most linked posts ever in the history of this blog… Yes… Long-time readers will remember the posts well… They were the toad sexing posts. (Originals here and here.)

Go over to the Dangerous and Daring Blog for Boys and Girls… Learn how to sex toads, make spider houses, and tell a ghost story.

And in case you are wondering… The most linked post in the history of Naked Villainy… It was this one: 10 Things…

Carry on.