Huge day for the local teams yesterday, with top-ranked SC avenging its only loss of the previous season and the Dodgers winning their first playoff game in sixteen years. For a team that has had the image of being a button-down, corporate operation long before they were purchased by Rupert Murdoch, having a player like Jose Lima really provides a crystal meth-sized jolt to the fanbase.

To those of you who do not know the concept of "Lima Time", the pitcher in question is a journeyman who won twenty games late in the last century, but who had pretty much disappeared from baseball, pitching last year for the Newark Bears in an unaffiliated minor league. He has always had a cult reputation among fans, thanks in large part to the hype he has received over the years from Jim Rome. He tried out for the Dodgers in spring training, made the team, and when Hideo Nomo's arm finally gave out, won a spot in the starting rotation. He still pitches like a journeyman on the road, where he gets lit up by the opposition routinely, but at Dodger Stadium, he has been almost unbeatable, and probably generates more excitement than any Dodger starter since Fernando.

In the tradition of Jim "Mudcat" Grant and Black Jack McDowell, he is also a professional singer of some repute, even singing the National Anthem before games. It is now routine for stadiums to blare out familiar songs when a particular hitter is at bat, often chosen by the player himself (for example, Adrian Beltre is greeted at the Stadium with "Hell's Bells" by AC-DC, while Shawn Green makes his plate appearances to the danceable beat of "Song 2"). When Jose Lima goes out to the mound, it's to something he wrote and sung himself.