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As you can see, the Expos are really only the second team to make their home in two different cities, the Dodgers being the first. I realize that a few teams have played some home games in other cities, but it's never been more than a single series in places like Las Vegas or Monterrey, Mexico. The Dodgers played seven times in Jersey City, using Roosevelt Stadium as a kind of halfway house between Brooklyn and Los Angeles.

5. The Biggest Mismatchup of the Week
Los Angeles at Detroit: Tuesday through Thursday.

Until Sunday's 10-3 loss to the White Sox, the Dodgers were the only team that had allowed fewer than 200 runs so far this season, while the Tigers remain the only team that has scored fewer than 200. What, then, is the over/under threshold for Tigers scoring in this Series? I'd say it is 9½ total.

Not that the Dodgers offense is any great shakes either, mind you. For the third straight year, their runs-per-game is dropping. In the recent past, this has been mostly attributable to the general downturn in National League scoring. No such excuse exists this year: they just flat out can't score runs. Since 1999, they've stayed remarkably close to the league average in runs scored -- not bad for a team in a good pitcher's park:

Year	N.L.	L.A.	Diff.
1999	5.00	4.90	-2.0% 
2000	5.00	4.93	-1.4%
2001	4.70	4.68	-.4%
2002	4.45	4.40	-1.1%

That's a mere 1.3 percent variation over four seasons running! (The exclamation point is placed there to celebrate the geeky joy of this discovery.) Then there's this year (through Saturday):

Year	N.L.	L.A.	Diff.
2003	4.59	3.60	-21.6%

I'm going to guess that no team has ever come in first place scoring over 20 percent less than the league average. I could be wrong, though.

6. The Look at What Could Have Been Matchup of the Week
Houston at Boston: Friday through Sunday.

Every team is bound to trade a player who goes on to make something of himself elsewhere. It happens. Accept it. I never get down on a team for unloading a future star provided they got something good in return. That's the key -- not who they gave up on, but who they got for him.

There are two ways a team can have such a trade fail. The first is that they exchange the future star for talented players who suddenly take a nosedive or get injured and the second is they exchange the future star for a commodity that -- quite obviously -- has no future whatsoever. A team cannot be blamed for the first eventuality in most cases, but it must be held accountable for the second and no team in perhaps all of baseball history can ever be more accountable for just such a move than the Red Sox with regard to Jeff Bagwell.

These are, in more or less order of desirability, the types of players one finds under contract to major league franchises:

Column A
Superstar
Sure-thing prospect
Superstar on last year of contract with no chance to return
Decent regular

Column B
Promising youngster who has not panned out in timely fashion
Replaceable regular
Young role player
Old role player
Minor league roster filler

When trading, it is advisable not to give up people from Column A for people in Column B. This is just what the Red Sox did and now Boston will get to spend a weekend with the man who could have been poking balls at the Green Monster for the past decade.

(This isn't to say that all the players in Column B are undesirable. There are many circumstances when you want all but the replaceable regular or minor league roster filler to help round out your roster or play a part. The thing is: you should never expend anything other than your own Column B players to make such a deal happen. If the team holding the players wants Column A talent for their Column B guys, look elsewhere -- they're out there.)

7. The Worst Matchup of the Week
San Diego at Cleveland: Tuesday through Thursday.

Gary Matthews, Jr. is being passed around the sport's lower orders like a bottle of T-Bird ("An American Classic") at a street bum mixer. His sixth and latest stop finds him with the wino that cracked the twist-off cap to start it all -- the Padres. He debuted with the '99 club, a sub-.500 grouping. Next it was on to the woeful 2000 Cubs. They improved the next year and had matched the number of victories from the season before in two-thirds the time when they decided Matthews wasn't for them. That was his one and only taste of winning as he was scooped up by the Pirates who went 18-30 in his tenure with them. A brief stop with the Mets produced a 1-1 record before it was off to 94 losses with last year's Orioles. They were 21-26 when they released him this year and have gone 8-6 since he left. Now he's back with the Padres and they've gone 6-10 since his arrival.

It would be interesting to know what player with a multi-year, multi-team career suited up for the worst combined record in baseball history. Any guesses? It is also interesting to note that my hobo/wine analogy doesn't really fly. Why? Because hobos never throw out bottles with wine still in them and Matthews has now been released twice.

He can help a team and -- because baseball can be like this sometime -- he might be someone who winds up in the right place at the right time and delivers a big hit in the postseason.

8. The Past Masters Matchup of the Week
St. Louis at N.Y. Yankees: Friday through Sunday.

Obviously named this because these teams represent the most World Championships in their respective leagues.

Naturally, they were bound to run into each other along the way and did in 1926, 1928, 1942, 1943 and 1964 with St. Louis winning the odd-numbered matchups. For whatever it's worth, the Cardinals had a better record in Yankee Stadium in those Series than did the Yankees and played better on the road than they did at Sportsman's Park. A sixth matchup has been in the offing four times in the past seven years, but the Cardinals have not been able to wend their way through the playoffs to get there.

Friday's game will give Roger Clemens another opportunity to try for his 300th career victory. (What was Clemens' hardest victory to come by? How many of them took more than four starts?) If this game is one-third as entertaining as Saturday's tilt against Kerry Wood and the Cubs, then it will be one for the books. Scalpers were getting some crazy money for that ticket but now, with the Lasik-corrected vision of hindsight, it had to be worth whatever people paid to get into the ballpark, didn't it? (Think about it: if a 7-1 snoozer at Tropicana Field costs $20.00, doesn't that make Saturday's rip-snorter at Wrigley worth $500.00 by comparison?)

It was essential viewing and was well worth sitting through the promos for Fox's new reality show "Holding It In" about a group of really attractive twenty-somethings seeing who can keep from going to the bathroom the longest.

9. The Natural Order Matchup of the Week
Philadelphia at Cincinnati: Friday through Sunday.

The problem with being in fantasy leagues is that it makes you take everything personally. It makes you think that baseball is the Truman Show and you are Truman, the star, around whom everything revolves. Pat Burrell's struggles to keep his batting average above .200 must be pretty damn frustrating for Pat Burrell and I'll bet he loses a lot of sleep over being the king of the 4000 Club. Well, I don't know that he has more 4000 lines in his box scores than anyone else this year, but, with 12, it sure seems like he's four-thousanding just about every other night.

Of course, it's just that I'm paying him extra attention because he was supposed to be one of the cornerstones of the fantasy team I co-own. In fact, I hold my co-owner, Sam, personally responsible because he is a Phillies fan and Burrell represents his team on our team. Rational? No -- but, then, isn't irrationality at the root of all true fantasy?

How worried should we be about Burrell? Probably not too. While his batting average has gone to seed, the other phases of his offensive game are holding their own. He is certainly not building on the improvements he made in 2002, but he is, at least, not regressing to the point beyond where he was as a rookie and a sophomore. After striking out over 30 percent of the time his first two years in the bigs, he lowered that to about one in four times last year.

This year it's back up to one in three. Not good, but nothing he hasn't done before. His ID -- or Isolated Discipline (a phrase coined by John Shiffert) -- is actually running at the best rate of his career right now. ID is that portion of On Base Average represented by walks. Burrell's is .116 this year, higher than the .99, .88 and .94 of his three previous seasons. Looking at his ground ball to fly ball ratios and the number of pitches he's seeing per at-bat, they're all comparable to what he's done in the past.

He'll be back because he really hasn't gone all that far away. However -- getting back to taking it personally -- we still have a team to run and Mr. Burrell was fortuitously benched last week to make way for Brad Wilkerson. The Phillies have no such delicioius alternatives which is another reason why it's called "fantasy."

10. The Father's Day Matchup of the Week
Montreal at Oakland: Sunday.

Didn't you always assume that Chris Singleton of the A's was the son of Ken, former big league All-Star with the Expos and Orioles? I know I did at first.

With so very many sons of former big leaguers populating the rosters of today's game, I just always now assume that when a player with a famous baseball surname shows up on a major league roster, he's the son of the guy with the same name. As with Singleton, that isn't always the case. And here, for Father's Day, is the All-Not-the-Son-of-Whom-You-Think Team:

Starting Pitchers
Darrell May (Royals) -- Milt May (C), 1970-84
Jason Schmidt (Giants) -- Mike Schmidt (3b), 1972-89

Relief Pitchers
Guillermo Mota (Dodgers) -- Manny Mota (of), 1962-82
Brian Fuentes (Rockies) -- Tito Fuentes (2b), 1965-78

Catcher
Benito Santiago (Giants) -- Jose Santiago (p), 1963-70

Second Base
Ricky Gutierrez (Indians) -- Cesar Gutierrez (ss), 1967-71

Shortstop
Derek Jeter (Yankees) -- Johnny Jeter (of), 1969-74

Third base
Wes Helms (Brewers) -- Tommy Helms (2b), 1964-77
Eric Munson (Tigers) -- Thurman Munson (c), 1969-79

Outfield
Chris Singleton (A's) -- Ken Singleton (of), 1970-84
Roger Cedeno (Mets) -- Cesar Cedeno (of), 1970-86
Juan Rivera (Yankees) -- Bombo Rivera (of), 1975-82

Designated Hitter
Dean Palmer (Tigers) -- Jim Palmer (p), 1965-84

Manager
Ned Yost (Brewers) -- Eddie Yost (3b), 1944-62

There were a couple of rules I followed in putting this team together. The first was that I tried very hard to avoid common last names like Wilson, Johnson, Rodriguez, Hernandez and the various color names like White, Brown and Green. Also, the assumed son had to be born during the major league playing career of the assumed father. I did this for the sake of realism, so that means someone like Dixie Walker could not stand in for Larry Walker's dad. That's why you don't see Jason Grimsley on the team. He was born four years before Ross -- his assumed dad and the real son of a major leaguer himself -- made his big league debut.

I regretted that I could not use Raul Casanova (not the son of Paul) at catcher, because he is currently languishing in Triple A. I did have to resort to Ricky Gutierrez at second base even though he has missed most of 2003, however.

11. The 1967 World Series Rematchup of the Week
St. Louis at Boston: Tuesday through Thursday

There are nine Series replays this week involving five different pairings. There are the aforementioned five represented by the Yankees-Cardinals, the two (including 1946) with these two clubs, the many-cities-removed rematch of the 1914 Braves and A's, the revisitation of the last White Sox Series win over the Giants in 1917, and the Dodgers-Indians of 1920. (Is it a good or bad thing that I knew all this without checking?)

Of these, I would like to focus on 1967 because of the recent talk of adding yet another round of playoffs to the baseball season. Commissioner Bud Selig, who has been heard to champion this cause, seems intent on doing as much damage to the game as he can before he either retires or is called to that big used car lot in the great hereafter. In 1967 four teams went down to the wire with a chance to win the American League pennant. Boston, Detroit, Minnesota and Chicago all had a shot with three of them still alive on the final weekend.

For you readers in the youngest demographic, that was what we used to call a "pennant race." They were very exciting because for the winner there was glory and for the also-rans there were no second chances. When the Red Sox clinched, regular network programming was interrupted to announce they had done so. The nation, you see, wanted to know.

Another round of playoffs would destroy once and for all what little semblance of the pennant race the wild card and three divisions haven't already sucked out of the game. If you think it's exciting watching two teams battle for the 16th and final spot in a league's postseason tournament, why not head over to that new subdivision near your house and watch the paint dry on some shutters?

12. The Inflationary Matchup of the Week
Atlanta at Oakland: Tuesday through Thursday

The Braves are scoring 24 percent more runs per game than they were last year -- which is very good -- but also allowing 33 percent more runs than they did last year -- which is not very good. This is taking place in a league where scoring is up by about three percent over 2002. Braves games this year look remarkably different than they did last year yet the team is rolling merrily along.

Here's the question, then: has a team ever experienced a blow up like this on both sides of the ball without benefit of a rule change or a ball change (think 1930) or a stadium change? And if one has, have they been able to sustain the high level of performance the Braves have?

13. The Mystery Matchup of the Week
? vs. ?

One of our combatants this week once had its entire starting lineup introduced in a Jerry Lewis movie. The other was immortalized in a movie as well, albeit fictionally. That one featured three former major leaguers in the cast, none of whom ever played for the team in question during their careers. Of the three, the one featured as a player was playing out of position in the movie.

The clue from last week read: This team played a key role in the history of major league baseball in their opponent's state, although this series will be their first regular season visit there. The answer I was looking for was Cleveland at Arizona. The Indians -- along with the then-New York Giants -- essentially created the Cactus League at the end of World War II.

Jim Baker writes Monday through Friday for ESPN Insider. He can be reached at jimbakerespn@yahoo.com.