Waking up this morning, I expected to see reams of stories about Dice-K and Ichiro battling it out last night in the Seattle-Boston clash.

I didn’t realise Felix Hernandez was starting for the Mariners.

He has long been known as King Felix and anyone who wasn’t convinced that this youngster deserved the title will now be bowing at their master’s feet begging for forgiveness.   In a game watched by millions around the world, Hernandez decided that he wasn’t interested in being the support act.  The spotlight was shining on Fenway last night.  The newly slim-lined Felix waltzed on to the stage and made it his own.

I know what I’ll be watching when I get home from work this evening.  The joys of archived games on MLB.com!

Most British baseball fans develop a daily ritual whereby one of their first tasks in the morning is to log on to MLB.com and check the results from the previous day’s play. You scour the scoreboard to see who won (and by how many runs) and then check the basic facts such as who was credited for the win, loss and save and who hit a homerun. You can then dive into the box scores to see how your fantasy players performed (counting the points as you go) before checking out the reports from the results that catch your eye.

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Lots of fun stuff on the Daily Rewind today (the episode for April 5), from the Padres’s Kevin Kouzmanoff and Khalil Greene tripping over each other to penguins in New York. But perhaps the funniest bit was the news that the authorities in Canada have ordered two of the Blue Jays’s promotional adverts to be re-filmed.

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It cannot have escaped your attention that Daisuke Matsuzaka makes his Major League debut today for the Red Sox.  Boston set it up for him yesterday, beating the Royals to tie the series 1-1 and allowing Matsuzaka to try to win the rubber match.  First pitch is scheduled for 19.10 (BST) and it promises to be a great way to start the Easter weekend.  Hopefully MLB.TV will be up to it, because I’m sure there will be plenty of traffic.

Those looking for a Dice-K primer should head over to the Special K page on Boston’s official site.  In particular have a read of the “Variety of pitches up his sleeve” article and watch the main multimedia clip by Will Carrol from Baseball Prospectus, dissecting Dice-K’s pitching mechanics.  Seeing how similar his delivery is to Roger Clemens’s is an eye-opener, not least because physically they are quite different in terms of body shape.  Whether he can produce the same results is what we are all waiting to see.  It should be fascinating to watch.

Great to see that the Daily Rewind is back on MLB.com this season.  It’s an invaluable way to keep up with all the action every day.  My favourite clip today was from the Red’s game.  There have been some hilariously bad ceremonial first pitches thrown over the years, but Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory’s was probably the worst I’ve seen.  He only missed the plate by about ten foot!  It was also good to hear that several ballparks broke their attendance records for opening day matches.  Baseball really is on the up and up and it’s great to see.

Not so sure about the advert breaks that they’ve introduced this season during the Daily Rewind though.  And as for Vintage Base Ball, I think I’ll give it a miss!

Baseball is back, with so many games going on at once it’s hard to keep up!

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I’m aware that some of you may not be able to watch MLB.TV this year for a variety of reasons out of your control, so apologies for rubbing it in but boy does baseball come back with a bang! Aces are out in force on Opening Day (well, opening days and nights) and the majority of the games are played in daylight, making them perfect for some British evening entertainment.

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Just hours away from the first pitch of the season, and with a nod to my post yesterday (basically saying that we cannot predict the baseball season), here are my 2007 Regular Season predictions!

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