Skeptics, including me, didn't think the league would last long, but we never anticipated it would fold after only fifteen games.

As expertly covered by Mark DeCotis of Florida Today, the first paychecks bounced, and the league suspended operations.

I was asked by Central Florida News 13, the local cable TV station, to do a standup interview about the league folding. Why? Because I'm around and everyone else is gone.

Click Here to watch the news segments as they appeared throughout the evening. You need Windows Media Player and a broadband (cable modem, DSL) Internet connection to watch.

I'm writing more about this on my other site, SpaceCoastBaseball.com, so head over there if you're interested.

I may be doing a piece for the local paper too. I'll post that link if/when it's published.

Not many articles lately, but then there hasn't been much to write about.

I wanted to let you know that I have been busy on Angels stuff.

In particular, I've been researching the annual FutureAngels.com Top 10 Prospects report. Unlike other fan sites who write these reports, I go out to see these players myself, and I talk quite a bit with people in the organization to find out what they think are the prospects' good and bad points.

Some statheads claim you can't talk to the people who actually watch the players because they're biased. Well, all I can say is that when I talk to staff on background they're pretty honest with me. I can read a line of stats as much as anyone else, but without the context they're meaningless.

This year, I have an extra advantage, a manager with another organization who saw some of our prospects. His opinions confirmed some of mine, but his insight also caused me to drop someone I wanted to include.

Look for the article somewhere around Thanksgiving.

If you're a regular reader, you know I've been busy with the Florida Winter Baseball League. If that interests you, visit my other web site at www.spacecoastbaseball.com.

Six former Angels minor leaguers are in the FWBL. Stantrel Smith, Baron Short and Anthony Sullivan are here with the Space Coast Surge. Tyler Johnson and Trevor Pippin are down in Miami with the Diamantes. Chris Garcia is in Sanford with the Seminole County Naturals. We form somewhat of an Angels clique within the league, and FWBL management is well aware these are my kids. Their Surge teammates know there's some sort of bond among us, although I'm not sure they know exactly what it is.

The Surge were at Seminole County this weekend. Chris Garcia homered off his former teammate, Baron Short. The next inning, I was walking past the Naturals dugout when Chris comes out to take his position at first base. He sees me and puts out his hand for a high five. I'm thinking, "Sure, but you just lit up Shorty."

Now I know how the Weaver parents feel when Jared and Jeff square off.

For those of you who remember Trevor Pippin, he was an outfielder with Tempe and Orem. He's still an outfielder with Miami, but he's also been pitching in relief for the Diamantes. I mentioned it to some of his former coaches, and they recalled he'd pitched as an amateur before the Angels signed him.

The box score for Sunday's Miami-Lake County game shows that Pip entered the game as a pinch-hitter for the designated hitter, which made him the DH, then he pitched in the bottom of the 8th. If the DH takes the field during a game, then his team may no longer use the DH and the pitcher must bat. But this is the first time I've ever heard of the DH becoming the pitcher.

Since the DH is eliminated once he takes the field, even as a pitcher, then once he's relieved as a pitcher anyone who follows him on the mound would also have to bat. But what if he moves from pitcher to another position? I guess the relieving pitcher would have to bat in the slot of the guy the ex-DH replaced.

This is why I hate the DH.

Regarding the screaming kid in the background ... Some parents turned loose their two-year old to play on the rocks down by the river. A couple minutes before launch, he throws his toy dump truck into the river, and as it floats away he starts screaming that he lost his dump truck. Being a two-year old, of course, nothing is going to make him happy, not even after someone fished out his dump truck. He kept screaming all the way through the launch. Gee, thanks.

A reminder when you watch the video that the speed of sound is roughly 1,100 feet per second. If you time from the moment of launch until you first hear the roar of the engines, we're roughly about 10-12 miles from the launch pad.

You'll also notice a tall crane between the pad and the Vehicle Assembly Building. That's for a new platform that will one day carry Constellation to the launch pad. The future of Constellation, however, is up in the air, no pun intended.

An unmanned rocket was supposed to launch on November 14 but had a last-minute glitch, so it was rolled back to its assembly building. No ETA on that one.

We held a reunion in late September of surviving Statesville Owls players. I videotaped the event and hope to have it online in a few days.

I'm editing the video now and was reminded of what someone said at the table. I checked Google and, sure enough, it's true.

Some of you may remember Ken Hunt, an Angels outfielder in 1961-1963.

One of the alumni recalls Hunt saying, "My son makes more money than I do!"

I've been writing about the Florida Winter Baseball League and its former Angels minor leaguers. Three of them are here with the Space Coast Surge, and two are down in Miami.

I found a sixth. Chris Garcia, who played first base for Tempe and Orem in 2007 and 2008, is with the Seminole County Naturals. One week into the season, he's second in the league in batting average at .391, 9 for 23.

I'll see Chris this weekend. The Surge will be in Sanford, about 60 miles from here, to play the Naturals on Sunday. I'll be doing photos and video for the league at the 1 PM EST day game.

The three former Angels with the Surge are Baron Short, Stantrel Smith and Anthony Sullivan. Tyler Johnson and Trevor Pippin are with the Miami Diamantes.

As I do every off-season, the Angels Minor League Game of the Week returns today on FutureAngels.com. It will run through the end of spring training, with a new game every Friday.

The idea is not only to get you through baseball withdrawal, but also to hopefully educate people more about the players in our minor league system. I archive the teams' webcasts during the season and provide them with copies on CD-ROM, and in exchange I get to post them during the off-season.

This year, I'm going to start with a tribute to Nick Adenhart. The first four webcasts will be memorable games in Nick's minor league career.

The first one is September 5, 2005. He'd just joined the Orem Owlz in Rookie-A, having completed his rehab from "Tommy John" surgery at our minor league complex in Arizona. Nick faced Orem's rival, the Ogden Raptors.

Some other interesting tidbits from this game ... Mark Trumbo hits two home runs. Marco Albano, who's now a Double-A reliever pitching in the Arizona Fall League, was a utility player at the time and was in the lineup at second base.

The broadcasters ... Um, I'm sorry.

The Owlz that year thought they would experiment by hiring two wanna-be stand-up comedians to be the broadcasters. They had no baseball broadcasting experience at all. The thinking was they would liven up the broadcasts by constantly making jokes.

In reality, not only did they know nothing about baseball, but also they were singularly unfunny.

Anyway, the link is on the FutureAngels.com home page at www.futureangels.com. You need Windows Media Player to listen.

In December, we'll start with 2009 season webcasts.

The weather was once again a factor as NASA tried to launch the Ares I-X. Because this is a test flight, NASA was concerned about a phenomenon that can cause clouds to reflect radio signals to and from the craft. Not only might they lose valuable data, but a self-destruct message might be lost too, which would be a bad day in my neighborhood should Ares be headed in my direction.

With 30 minutes left in today's launch window, the weather people found a gap in the clouds long enough for Ares to launch. Click here to read CNN's report on the launch. The video on that page is a NASA compilation, including a camera mounted on the craft's fuselage.

The above video is shot from my driveway, looking northeast towards Kennedy Space Center and Pad 39-B. You'll note that the rocket sound doesn't reach us until nearly a minute after launch; because sounds travels at about one mile every five seconds, that tells you I'm about 12 miles away from 39-B. But less than two minutes into the recording, it gets pretty loud. The house windows were rattling; it reminded me of a minor earthquake back in California.

My "A" camcorder is out for repair, so I had to use an older one with less quality. I lost track of the rocket right after launch because the view finder isn't all that great. But you get the idea.

I wrote on Thursday about the historical significance of two different spacecraft on the Shuttle launch pads.

I suspected NASA would have someone take a photo showing both craft, and sure enough it showed up online today.

Ares 1-X is supposed to launch tomorrow (Tuesday) at 8 AM EDT with a four-hour launch window, but there's only a 40% chance of acceptable weather.

I hope to go out and videotape it, but I've been sick with a mild case of the flu since Saturday. If they launch, and if I film it, I'll post it here as I've posted previous launches since arriving in Florida.

Count me firmly in the "no" column.

Tim McCarver made an excellent point during last night's telecast. How far does it go? Strike zone calls? Checked swings? Balks? A failure to call a balk? How's about that phantom double play call at second base when the infielder usually gets the call if he's "in the vicinity"?

And what about obscure rules like coaches standing in the coach's box, or how high on a bat pine tar is permitted?

MLB has allowed instant replay for home run calls, and so far it's been rarely used -- because home run calls are rarely disputed.

A situation like Game #4 where Mike Napoli tagged two runners who were not standing on the base would seem like a valid situation.

But how do you write into the rulebook the controlled use of instant replay so it doesn't become abusive? And how do you address errors that might occur in subjective decisions such as strike zone?

Years ago, when I was pursuing a career as a full-time writer, I noodled around with an idea for a novel about professional baseball several hundred years in the future. One idea I had was that technology had come so far that baseball had eliminated human umpires and implemented a system called Perfect Umpire.

Perfect Umpire was an integrated technology woven into the literal fabric of the game. Uniforms were made of tiny filaments that would sense position, contact and movement. The same with baseballs. The fields were artificial surfaces made of the same material. All of it was instantly transmitted into a computer server that would always make the right call.

In theory.

In the opening scene, the primary character dives for a ball and catches it -- only Perfect Umpire rules he trapped it.

Ballplayers -- and unscrupulous owners -- have figured out ways to hoodwink the technology, the futuristic versions of the corked bat and sandpaper.

It was all tongue in cheek, of course, but the point was that no technology is perfect when human beings are involved.

All instant replay does is inject human judgment at a different step in the process. Will it improve the number of correct calls? Hard to say. The track record with instant replay in the NFL, in my opinion, has been somewhat mixed. I've seen replays that are inconclusive. Then what? Stick with the ruling on the ground? So all you've done is validate the original ruling, or at least shown the technology isn't any better than human judgment, which meant it was a waste of time.

Instant replay might have reversed blown calls like the two runners on third in Game #3. But do we really want to see managers call for instant replay over and over again when an infielder is in the neighborhood on a double play turn at second? Technically, yes, he's supposed to touch the bag. But neither do we want to increase the number of injuries to infielders.

It seems to me that instant replay complicates things, and removes a certain charm unique to the game.

Extra for experts ... "Perfect Umpire" was a homage to the long-defunct Perfect Writer, the first word processor software I ever used. It came with the Kaypro II, a CP/M computer I bought circa 1984.

Unbeknownst to those individuals, MLBlogs.com posts a monthly listing of the most popular blogs on their service. The FutureAngels.com Blog consistently has been in the top ten fan blogs, although it's slipped a bit in the last couple months simply because so many new blogs have joined their service.

MLBlogs.com just posted their 2009 regular season rankings. The FutureAngels.com Blog finished #10 in the fan blog category. It's clearly the most popular Angels blog on their service. They list the top 60, although they have many more than that.

Unlike the fan boards, I'm not into the "who's the most popular" debate. Number of hits doesn't equate to quality of content.

So I'm posting this for the public record.

For the first and quite probably the last time, two different spacecraft currently sit on launch pads at Kennedy Space Center.

Pad 39-A currently hosts STS-129, scheduled for launch on November 16.

Pad 39-B has the Ares 1-X test rocket, scheduled for launch on October 27.

Ares is the next-generation vehicle planned to replace the Space Shuttle, which is scheduled for retirement by the end of 2010. It's a return to the Apollo-era technology, a capsule atop a rocket.

Pads 39-A and 39-B were once identical, but 39-B was partially deconstructed to accommodate the Ares test flight. After 1-X launches, the rest of the structure will be demolished and a new gantry will be built.

You'll notice that the lightning rod at 39-A is atop the gantry, while over at 39-B it's been removed and three new towers have been built nearby to draw away lightning from the vehicle.

I shot these photos today from an observation tower halfway between the two sites, less than three miles away. The Kennedy Space Center bus tour takes you to the tower, where you get a magnificent view of all the significant structures on base.

Just to the east of the observation site is the intersection where the road splits to go to Pads A and B. Below is a photo of the intersection, along with a sign displaying the message, "Ares 1-X Welcome to Pad B." How friendly.

Choose your departure point -- Pad A or Pad B.