Here's something I never knew. Fenway Park used to have the AL standings up on the facade along the third base line. Check out this pic, and you can see the ten banners, one for each team in the league at the time. At least I think that's what this is. The colors seem to match the order of finish for the '67 season (the pic is from the World Series that year). Boston first, Tigers second, etc. (The only one that seems off is the tenth-place KC Athletics, but maybe it was an old flag--they only switched to green and gold a few years earlier.) The flags are also divided up into two sets of five. If you've ever read baseball articles from pre-divisional play, you'll see a lot of talk of "first division" and "second division," meaning the top five and the bottom five. I wonder if they had the NL on the other side.

[Update: Here's another pic from that (awesome) site. It's from '69 (MLB sleeve patch gives it away) and you can see the banners up on the other side. There six, then a space--'69 was the first season of divisional play and there were six teams in each division, so that must be the NL East up there.]

Sox at Philly tonight. I'm gonna be hosting some live game threads starting tomorrow here for the afternoon game. After that I'll do some next week. Joy Boy is on vacation so the folks from there, here, and anywhere else will be welcome to join in.