Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson learned this lesson the hard way: baseball is not a betting man's game. After all, baseball is a sport where a batter is deemed successful if he fails 70 percent of the time, and a team which wins only 60 percent of its game is typically playoff bound.

Throughout history baseball has defied logic and thrown its fair share of curveballs. 2006 was certainly no different.

Let's start with the two World Series teams. St. Louis, which ended up winning the World Series, had the worst record of all the playoff teams and only the 11th-best record in Major League baseball. Only in baseball could a team like that be crowned "World Champion". Don't get me wrong, I am not in any way discrediting the Cardinals for winning the Series - but as a purist, I like to see the best team win, and certainly St. Louis didn't fit that description.

Their World Series opponent fit the description a little better. The Detroit Tigers, winners of 95 games, were one of the feel good stories of 2006. The team came a long way from 2003, when under Alan Trammell they lost 119 games. Any team that can go from dead last in the American League to winning 95 games on its way to a World Series appearance three years later deserves all the praise in the world.

But while for the majority of the season the Tigers might have been the best team in baseball, no team that commits five errors in a seven-game series leading to eight unearned runs can expect to be World Series champions.

What else strikes me as odd is the fall of both the Tigers and Cardinals in the second half of the season. In pennant chases which should have gone into September uncontested, both teams managed to make their respective races tight right up until the end of the season

Another example I will provide is Joe Giradi winning the National League Manager of the Year. I think the honor was very well deserved as he took a bunch of young yet talented kids and turned then into a legitimate playoff threat for parts of the season. I just find it odd that the eventual N.L. Manager of 2006 was also the first manager fired. But I guess the business and inner-workings of a baseball team and the camaraderie of the management and its manager far outweighs on-field productivity.

Those are just some of the oddities in 2006, with many more not mentioned. I look forward to sharing my perspective again very soon.