If "confession" is good for the soul, "correction" can't be too far behind it on the list of benefits accruing to one who writes as often as I do. There are three small items I wish to bring up this weekend that will adjust and modify some of the things I said last Friday.

The first involves Jeriome Robertson. I had mentioned him on the 23rd in relation to Wade Miller's run support. Miller's run support in 2003 was a healthy 5.48 runs per game, and I had thought for a long time that Robertson should be up there too, but he wasn't. I couldn't find Robertson's numbers anywhere, in fact, and was deeply puzzled. Then, in a stroke of luck that made me exclaim "DOH!" as loudly as Homer Simpson ever has, I discovered that STATS, Inc. and, by extension, ESPN.com, lists Robertson as a "non-qualifiying" pitcher last season. That is, he didn't pitch enough innings to qualify as a league-leader in the categories that are ranked. The rule is, if I remember it correctly, a pitcher has to average at least one inning pitched for ever game his team plays. Robertson, at 160.2 IP for 2003, fell short of that mark. His run support, though, as we all (even I) know, was better than Miller's, at 6.83 runs per game. Redding's number, by the way, was 3.68 runs per game.

In my recent listing of bullpen candidates, the only men I considered "locks" to make the staff in 2004 were Octavio Dotel and Brad Lidge. The rest of the men I mentioned were discussed more or less in the order of my estimation of their talent. Dan Micelli was on that discussion list, but you can add his name to the group of "locks" to make the staff. His contract is guaranteed this year, a fact that slipped my mind when I wrote last week. Another bullpenner whom I keep forgetting about is Brandon Backe, the reliever the Astros got in the deal that sent Geoff Blum to Tampa Bay. The oversight of Backe was unintentional. He's so new that I just can't keep his name in my head. In addition, I know next-to-nothing about him, which doesn't help either you or me, beyond the fact that he throws pretty hard and that he does have a chance to make the staff for Opening Day or be a factor later on. He is, I believe, supposed to be on the upcoming Astroline, so maybe that will give me a chance to learn more about him and fix him in my short-term memory more firmly.

Long-term memory, however, doesn't seem to be a problem. Darrell Pittman informs us on The Astros Daily message board this Saturday morning that the eighth edition of Total Baseball is due out at the end of April. What a great piece of news that is. There are many wonderful statistical books available to baseball fans--any of Bill James' Historical Abstracts and the works issuing from Baseball Prospectus leap to mind--but Total Baseball is, in my estimation, the one indispensable reference book for the sport, the one book fans should buy if they can afford only one book. Its breadth and depth of information offered between two covers is unmatched by any other work, and it's about darn time for a new edition. The current one, the seventh, was for all practical purposes out-of-date for present-day players once the 2001 season ended. The new edition should answer a myriad of questions: for example, if it is true that John Valentin's game has fallen off in the last few seasons (his TPR at the end of 2000 was 15.3, quite respectable), how far has it fallen off? Total Baseball will tell us. Another obvious query: where do Barry Bonds's accomplishments since 2000 place him in relation to the other greats of baseball history? Wherever his place is, his position there is unlikely to make any of us quit talking about Babe Ruth as the supreme icon of the sport, but I still want to know where Bonds ranks. He is, in my opinion, the greatest player since Ruth, but maybe his numbers show him to be even better than that. When Darrell passed the word Saturday, I hopped on over to Amazon.com and pre-ordered the book for $45 and change. You can get it even cheaper than that with Amazon's super-saver shipping, if you're willin' to wait forever and a day for the book once it comes out, which I am not. I want it NOW, thank you.

Please, is it April yet?

Thinking about Total Baseball over coffee this morning brought back some strong memories of spending a couple of weeks in John Sealy hospital in Galveston in June of 1967. Yeah, '67. Smack dab in the middle of the Six-Day war in the Middle East and the marathon 15-inning All-Star Game, won by the National League 2-1 with Mike Cuellar, Jim Wynn, and Rusty Staub all playing for the Nationals. My gentle father, a decade younger then than I am now, as hard as that is for me to believe, and probably far more worried about his son than he ever let me know, bought several things for me to get me through that time--a baseball glove, a ball (how large and smooth it was!) and, best of all for a boy already bookish, paperback copies of the 1967 Red and Green books, books that were, at that time and for many years after, the standard reference guides to major-league baseball teams, used by sportswriters and broadcasters everywhere. The Red and Green books also had brief biographies of players, which gave me my first info on players whose names are still lodged in my mind--Gary Peters and Tommy John of the White Sox; Joel Horlen, too. Vada Pinson of the Reds, Sonny Siebert of the Indians, Jim Fregosi of the Angels, and a very young, darn-near-a-rookie Don Sutton of the Dodgers, referred to as a "Bible-reading" right-hander. True, I'm sure, but it struck me then as an odd fact to stick in a biographical paragraph about a baseball player, and it seems that way now, too.

The Red and Green books were my own bibles--the National League one serving as the New Testament and the American League one serving as the Old Testament. Never mind that the AL was formed after the NL; the way to salvation, friends, is through the National League, a fact since confirmed for me through the heresy of the DH. I'm still waitin' for the AL to repent. I kept those books through at least 1968, slept with them near, if not under, my pillow, and read them both religiously. Baseball opened itself to me in those pages every day, even if the Astros weren't playing well on the field (they certainly weren't), and I was changed by the experience. Reference books about baseball have come a long way in sophistication since the days of the Red and Green books, but there's still no better way I know to foster a love of the game and its history in children than to press into their hands a copy of the best book on baseball you can find, whatever that book may be.