Well, it's another month down. The NALB is through the month of May. The Brooklyn Knights lost 8 games during the month but are still pacing the league with a blistering 45-13 record. With the NALB's top offense behind them, the Dayton Grizzlies are 33-25 and trying to keep up with the Knights. The Las Vegas Luck (30-28) and St. Rock Mudcats (20-38) round out the division in third and fourth place respectively. Leading the other divisions are Cornfield (30-28), Stade (38-20) and a tie between Phoenix and Vancouver (both at 28-30).

Dick Moran cooled a bit from his scorching April numbers but not by much. He remained the Knights best all-around offensive player. Moran is hitting .341 with 11 HR and 33 RBI. Fred Millard continued his outstanding season, running his record to 11-0 with a 1.70 ERA and 88 strikeouts. Dave Hambright is not far behind at 10-1. However, he suffered a devastating loss to the Dayton Grizzlies back on May 17. In that game, Hambright surrendered 10 earned runs which sent his ERA skyrocketing. He finished the month with an ERA of 3.24.

The first month of the 2005 NALB season is over. April is now in the books. The Brooklyn Knights are off to a spectacular start. Despite dropping two games to the Cornfield Axemen in the last week, we still managed to finish the month at 24-5. We have opened up a 5 game lead on the Dayton Grizzlies. The Grizzlies have been playing great as well and we look forward to playing them when we travel to Dayton on May 12.

Our offense has been good but not quite as explosive as last season. We hope that some of the guys who haven't been producing get it in gear in May. Our pitching, however, has been the backbone of the team. Both Dave Hambright and Fred Millard opened the season at 6-0. Ozzie Valera isn't far behind at 5-1. So far, we are injury free and I am very satisfied with the start to our season.

I added a new section to the role-playing category on Game Central tonight. The section is for Boot Hill, TSR's old western role-playing game. I put up a brief synopsis of our campaign (a single adventure, actually) that we played back in the early 1990s. I also included game stats for the four characters who took part in the adventure.

Things have been quiet on the baseball gaming front for some time. I finished up my last season of computer baseball in 2003. That was the NALB 2004 season. I was actually a year ahead in the fictional NALB universe. 2003 was the year that i switched to the Mac. I had Out of the Park Baseball 5 but there was no Macintosh version. Out of the Park Baseball 6 and 6.5 came out later and they were Windows-only as well. So I decided to shelve the league until there was a native Mac version of the game. I had plenty of other Mac games to keep me busy but I did miss the fun I had playing OOTP Baseball.

A lot has happened with OOTP Baseball over the last three years. The company became part of Sports Interactive. SI was in turn acquired by Sega. The best news of all was that Out of the Park Baseball 2006 was released this spring for both Windows and Mac. The Windows version debuted on May 31 and the Mac version was released on June 6. I purchased the new Mac version the day it came out.

Unfortunately, there were some growing pains. The original download had a problem with the license key. It also had a problem importing my old league from OOTP Baseball 6. The import would cause the game to crash every time. Thankfully, several patches have followed the original release. Version 1.03 was released on 9/1/06 and it is probably going to be the final patch for OOTP 2006. The developers will be starting work on OOTP 2007 shortly. With the latest patch installed, I am now ready to begin the NALB 2005 season. I have been progressing through the preseason and so far this version seems pretty stable.

On a rainy Labor Day Saturday, I was able to devote some time to playing the final Brood War Zerg mission. There were 10 Zerg missions in all. I found the last few missions pretty challenging and had to resort to some frequent saving/loading of critical spots. I just finished Zerg 10 and completed the StarCraft saga as it stands for now. The final cinematics were excellent as usual. Hopefully, Blizzard is hard at work on StarCraft II. I am anxious to see where they take the story next.