“I know this team,” he said of the Padres. “I’ve seen this team a lot. I know they are going to be aggressive. I know they are looking early.”

Boy, if other pitchers figure out how to pitch effectively against the Padres, the boys might have a lot of trouble winning games.

Strasburg ‘09!

...we have no idea what we’re doing.

Black has opted to start Cha Seung Baek on Friday night, giving Jake Peavy at least one additional day of rest. But Black stopped short of saying Peavy would start Saturday.

Will it be Greg Maddux on regular rest Saturday, although he is 1-7 lifetime at Chase Field with a near-six ERA? Will it be Peavy on an extra day’s rest? Or could it be Clay Hensley, with Peavy pushed back to Sunday so that Maddux could skip Arizona?

He has a white underbrim, the official caps have a black one. This has been driving me crazy.

I googled to find out.

This is more a rant than anything else. For the first time I came up against armies consisting largely of Spanish Jinettes. I have come across this type of unit before, but only in small numbers, and usually when I was defending a territory. My real problems began when I attacked the territory with 6 units of Jinettes. I had more than enough strength to handle them, but was initially unprepared to deal with the chicken-sh*t tactics they employed. I’ve dealt with mounted archers before, so I had no trouble in using flanking maneuvers on each individual unit of Jinettes. This went well at first, until the rest of them decided that they were going to avoid me all together. I couldn’t get a unit within a few hundred yards of them before they would start to run in another direction. I eventually managed to pin most of them in a corner, and slowly tightened the noose. Meanwhile, I had other mounted units chasing the stragglers around the battlefield. I didn’t have time to flank each and every unit, as those individuals who would escape, eventually turned around and came back to harass me.

So we’re going to need to use the terrain to our advantage and if we have any kind of armored spear infantry, that would really help.