You don't need baseball columns like Week in Review to tell you that Barry Bonds has a dandy little season going.

You don't need baseball columns like Week in Review to tell you the Seattle Mariners are going to win 50 more games than the Devil Rays.

You don't need baseball columns like Week in Review to tell you that Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson have a chance to accumulate twice as many wins as Mike Hampton and Denny Neagle.

Nah, that kind of story is for all those mainstream baseball columns out there. At Week in Review, it's our job to alert you to some of the impending baseball dramas, now building steam for these last three weeks, that have fallen so far beneath most radar screens they're in danger of being inhabited by sea urchins.

That's our job. And we'll start right now -- with this year's first edition of the Hidden Dramas of September.

Touring the Brewery
It's no longer a question of whether the Milwaukee Brewers are going to make history. The only question now is merely how much history.

We're actually so fond of the Brewers around here that we're not even going to focus on the 94 intentional walks they've issued. Or the fact that they're 0-66 when they trail after eight innings. Or the 23 home runs they've allowed in the ninth inning or later. Or even the 10 straight games in which their Opening Day starter, Jamey Wright, has hit at least one batter.

No, that kind of stuff could happen to anybody. But when it comes to the art of swinging and missing -- no team has ever done that quite like this team.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's a swinging-and-missing age we live in. So if you're going to do it, might as well do it unlike any other team. Here then are the big whiffing dramas this team has got, uh, brewing:

1. Total team effort. With 1,185 strikeouts through Thursday, these guys are only 83 punchouts away from the all-time single-season strikeout record, set by the '96 Tigers in (fittingly) a game against the Brewers. So we wouldn't say there's no chance this team could avoid setting that record. But there's a better chance of Michael Jackson playing nose tackle for the Packers. The Brewers have averaged 8.5 strikeouts a game for their first 140 games. They'd have to average 3.7 a game not to break the record. At their current pace, they'll break it by nearly 100. Phew.

	150-K teammates
	2000 Angels Mo Vaughn 181 (1st in league) Troy Glaus 163 (3rd) 1998 Cardinals Mark McGwire 155 (3rd) Ray Lankford 151 (4th) 1991 Tigers Rob Deer 175 (1st) Cecil Fielder 151 (3rd) (Travis Fryman had 149) 1987 Rangers Pete Incaviglia 168 (2nd) Larry Parrish 154 (7th) 1986 Mariners Jim Presley 172 (4th) Danny Tartabull 157 (5th) 1975 Phillies Mike Schmidt 180 (1st) Greg Luzinski 151 (3rd)

2. The 150-150-150 club. Back in 1991, the Tigers came within one strikeout by Travis Fryman of becoming the first team in history to have three members of its lineup punch out at least 150 times each. No team has approached that distinction since -- until now. Jose Hernandez (160) and Richie Sexson (154) have already made the Brewers the seventh team in history with two 150-K-makers. (See chart.) The question is whether Jeromy Burnitz (130) will be the third. It will be close. Burnitz would have to average a strikeout a game the rest of the way to get there. And guess what he's currently averaging? Yep. A strikeout a game (130 in 133 games). So watch those box scores.

3. The short form. Then there's Hernandez, a strikeout historian unto himself. With 160 strikeouts, he already has blown away the record for most whiffs by a shortstop (147, by Benji Gil in 1995). But can he lead the league? Only four shortstops have ever done that -- Zoilo Versailles in 1965, Eddie Joost in 1947, Frankie Crossetti in 1937 and '38, and Doc Lavan in 1915. But Hernandez's lead over Sexson is just six K's, with 22 games to play. Only one word for that: Precarious.

4. Whiff-to-hit ratio. -- But of all the unbelievable Brewers numbers on a stat sheet near you, none beats this one: 1,185 strikeouts, 1,181 hits. It used to be a big deal if a player had more strikeouts than hits for a season. Here we have a whole team with more K's than H's. The Elias Sports Bureau reports there has never been a team in history whose whiffs outnumbered its hits. So it's just one giant Rob Deer tribute in this town. But as close as this race is, it could go right down to the wire. Now that's drama.

2. The other 150-150 club
As long as we're exploring that 150-150 theme, our hero, Sammy Sosa, has quite the fascinating subplot working to his MVP campaign. He's on the verge of joining the little-known 150-150 Club -- as in 150 RBI, 150 strikeouts.

Now Sosa wouldn't be the first member -- in part, because he's joined this club before. In 1998, he had 158 RBI and 171 strikeouts. And that allowed him to co-chair the club meetings with the original 150-150 man, Andres Galarraga (157 K's, 150 RBI, in 1996).

Ah, but nobody has entered this board room twice. And Sammy's right on course. He came into Friday with 137 RBI (exactly one a game) and 136 strikeouts (ditto, more or less). So 13 more RBI, 14 more strikeouts and history has been achieved. Tremendous.

The other 20-20 club
Marquis Grissom has had himself quite a year. He was airlifted out of Milwaukee. He threw on a Dodgers cap and talked Gary Sheffield into sticking around. Then he started hitting home runs. And now, after making just 14 trots last year, he's up to 20 homers this year.

But what makes this doubly impressive is that Grissom spent part of this season as the Dodgers' leadoff man. And let's just say he doesn't quite fit that Rickey-esque why-swing-when-you-can-walk leadoff mold.

Nearly 400 plate appearances into his season, Grissom has walked precisely 13 times. Which means he's heading for a season in which he's going to hit 20 homers -- but not walk 20 times.

So how rare is this? Well, according to Elias, three men did it last year -- Daryle Ward (20/15), Ivan Rodriguez (27/19) and Glenallen Hill (27/19). But there's a difference between them and Marquis Grissom.

Ward and Hill were part-time players. Rodriguez got hurt and missed one-third of the season. So they didn't get the 400 at-bats Grissom will wind up with.

To find the last player to make this 20-20 Club with that many at-bats, you have to go back to the '97 Indians, where Sandy Alomar Jr. hit 21 homers and walked 19 times in 451 at-bats.

So this is getting tougher. But wait. Not only is Grissom clearly not going to walk 20 times, he may not even walk 15 times. And this is where you get into rarified territory.

How many players have batted 400 times in a season, hit 20 homers but not even walked 15 times? That would be exactly ...

None.

So can Marquis Grissom walk two more times and stay out of this particular 20-15 Club? Only three weeks of baseball can answer that question. We can hardly wait.

Triplet of the week
He had two hits in his previous 70 at-bats. He'd struck out 67 times since his last extra-base hit.

His lifetime batting average stood at .088 -- which, by our calculations, made Al Leiter the proud owner of the eighth-lowest average in history among players who had visited home plate as many times as he had.

So what we're getting at here is that, among the ranks of men in baseball most likely to hit a triple, we'd have given our pal Al Leiter approximately the same shot we'd give, oh, Fred Wilpon.

But that just shows what we know. Because last Friday night at Shea Stadium, we have videotape corroboration, box-score substantiation and 23,020 paying eyewitnesses to testify that the sweet-swinging Mets left-hander really did hit himself a triple.

Which evokes only one question:

How?

The technical answer would be this: The three Marlins outfielders were playing about 10 feet behind the infielders. Leiter lofted what would have been a fly ball to left-center for just about anybody else. And once the ball landed in open outfield spaces, it was free to roll all the way to Staten Island.

OK, so much for the technical explanation. Now it's time for the real explanation.

"I'm looking for a word here," Leiter's batterymate, Mike Piazza, told Week in Review. "I think the word would be anomaly. Is that right?"

Well, according to our dictionary, an anomaly is "something abnormal or unusual." So that's a brilliant word, all right.

"It was just one of those weird stellar phenomena," Piazza said. "But I always knew it could happen, because I've got two triples. Now I'm not the slowest guy in baseball, but I know the conditions have to be right for me to hit a triple. ... And Al's the same thing. The conditions just had to be right."

Exactly. Outfielders playing 100 feet too shallow. The outfield surface dry and fast. And, most critically, Leiter makes authentic contact.

"If you just go by the law of averages, they were with Al," said Piazza of his esteemed batterymate, who had a mere 158 more lifetime strikeouts (187) than hits (29) at that point. "Eventually, you figured that sooner or later, he would make contact. He'd had too many at-bats. So for that to happen, the pitcher had to, essentially, hit his bat."

But in Leiter's defense, it's not as if he'd never hit a triple before. He distinctly recalls hitting one -- "in Little League."

"I don't ever remember tripling in high school," Leiter told Week in Review cross-examiners. "But I know I hit one in Little League. That's why I had to keep the bat. Except the next day, I used it in BP, and our BP pitcher threw one in on me and broke it. So now I've got a broken bat that I'm saving because it's the bat I used to hit my first triple in the big leagues."

Ah, but he digresses from his own defense. Let's also remember that Leiter is the answer to the following amazing trivia question:

Who's the only American League pitcher to hit an extra-base hit in the World Series in the '90s?

Happened in Game 4 of the '93 Series (a.k.a. The 15-14 Game), back when Leiter owned no career at-bats, was pitching in relief and practically needed to ask directions to home plate.

"What a mess that was," he reminisced. "I didn't have a bat. I didn't have a helmet. I came in, and they said, 'You're up.' I said, 'WHAT?' So Ed Sprague gave me his bat. I think I used Pat Borders' gloves. And I hit a double. So after the game, Sprague came up and gave me his bat."

All of that was indeed impressive, certainly. But at least according to Piazza, it doesn't compare to this triple, if only because of the extra running involved. Asked afterward if he could remember the last time he actually sprinted 270 consecutive feet, Leiter replied: "I think it was 1993."

We asked Piazza if Leiter bore any resemblance at all to noted sprinter Maurice Greene.

	“	That's just Piazza trying to be all impressive. That's what he does. He drops these big phrases on you so everybody thinks he's smart or something. ”
		— Al Leiter

"How can I describe it?" Piazza mused. "It was more like that term, 'centrifugal force.' I think that's it. Once he gets going, centrifugal force was in effect, kind of like a runaway locomotive. Once the train gets going, it takes time for it to stop.

"What's that movie with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor? (Correct answer: Silver Streak.) You know the one where the train gets out of control and runs right through the station? It was kind of like that."

But when given a chance to respond to that centrifugal-force theory, Leiter rummaged through his own mental dictionary, then retorted: "Now, see. That's a stupid comment."

"Centrifugal force?" he went on, clearly outraged. "That's when you spin something, and it gains velocity based on the torque of the spin, and then it like hits the wall or something. I was running. I wasn't spinning.

"That's just Piazza trying to be all impressive. That's what he does. He drops these big phrases on you so everybody thinks he's smart or something."

Sure enough. We looked up "centrifugal," and it's defined as "acting in a direction away from a center or axis." Which means we award the round to Leiter. But this still begs the question: "If this triple wasn't a tribute to centrifugal force, then what was it?"

"Oh," Leiter said. "Pure luck."

Historian of the week
One of the tough things about this crazy, new-millennium world of ours is that hardly a day goes by anymore where somebody doesn't break some kind of record. So who can blame the modern baseball player if he has a hard time keeping track of them all?

Which brings us to the case of Roy Oswalt, the phenomenal rookie right-handed record-breaker for the Houston Astros.

This week, Oswalt zoomed into the Astros' bulging history books by raising his record to 13-2. Which made him the winningest rookie pitcher ever to wear those proud Astros colors, all 12,000 of them.

When you consider that J.R. Richard, Larry Dierker, Darryl Kile, Mike Hampton and Shane Reynolds were all distinguished Astros rookies once, we think we can safely conclude: That's good.

Except that the record Oswalt broke didn't belong to any of those guys. It belonged to one of our favorite living humans -- longtime Week in Review hero Jim Deshaies, who went 12-5 for the fabled 1986 rainbow-warrior Astros.

Losing a record like that, Deshaies told Week in Review, "felt kind of like when you're a kid and your pet goldfish dies. You knew it wasn't going to last forever, but it's still hard to say goodbye. I never expected this goldfish to live 15 years. So you just enjoy it while you have it. Then you flush it down the toilet when it dies."

But Deshaies' biggest blow had nothing to do with his little fishbowl. It had to do with Oswalt's 100-percent honest reaction to the news that it was Deshaies who held this record. We can summarize that reation in two words:

Who's that?

OK, so we know this means Oswalt has never read this column even once, since Deshaies has been quoted in it at least 3.7 million times. But we can forgive Roy Oswalt for that. Not reading this column remains a consistent goal of many otherwise-normal Americans.

But in his current, post-pitching life, Jim Deshaies is currently an Astros broadcaster-- who had just interviewed this same Roy Oswalt on television that week. So you would have thought Deshaies would have been hard to miss.

"It was amazing how many people said to me that night, 'Hey, Roy Oswalt doesn't know who you are,'" Deshaies told Week in Review. "So the next day, I went up and introduced myself and said, 'Did I not intoduce myself to you in spring training?' And his face got all red, and he said, 'Man, I'm terrible at names.' And then he just kind of rolled up into a ball in the clubhouse."

Being the magnanimous gentleman he is, though, Deshaies hasn't started going around wearing a name tag. He's even forgiven Oswalt for this minor transgression, mostly because he remembers what an oblivious knucklehead he was himself as a rookie.

"I guess if I found out Roy Oswalt knew a whole lot about a lot of other Astros pitchers and he didn't know anything about me, I'd be hurt," Deshaies said. "And I know it would have been better if he'd said, `Jim Deshaies? That's the television guy. I didn't know he was a pitcher.'

"But basically, he's just a rookie pitcher going out there with the world swirling around him. And he doesn't really care much about who's who. He just wants to take the ball every fifth day."

And you know what? That's fine. For him.

But here at Week in Review, we're concerned about all those future generations of record breakers who may not know Jim Deshaies from Rutherford B. Hayes. We wouldn't want them to find themselves in the same embarrassing situation.

That's why, despite lack of popular demand, wer'e here to present The First Official Guide to Jim Deshaies Records in History:

The pickoff moves
This little-known record may not be up there with Old Hoss Radbourn's 59 wins in 1884, or with Nolan Ryan's 383 strikeouts in 1973. But real, living statisticians computed that in 1989, the great Jim Deshaies made an astounding 355 pickoff throws in one season.

It may or may not be a record that will never be broken. For all we know, it may not be a record at all. But Deshaies is claiming it as one. And that's good enough for us.

"I'm assuming that one's still mine," Deshaies said proudly. "Until somebody tells me otherwise, I'll still claim it."

This might actually be a record no one even wants to set. But Deshaies' fondest memory of his chase of it is that he was able to exploit, for pure humorous purposes, one of the most spectacular scoreboard features baseball has ever witnessed.

In the good old days of baseball in Montreal, assuming there were any, the Expos used to keep track of how many pickoff tosses a visiting pitcher made to first base for each runner by displaying an animated chicken figure on the scoreboard for each toss. So if a pitcher was particularly persistent, he could run up five, six, even seven chickens.

But Deshaies he once had "at least 11" chickens up there.

"Once they started hanging chickens, I said, 'If you want to hang chickens, then by golly, we're going to hang some chickens,'" he recalled, fondly. "Talk about your game within a game. The heck with pitcher-versus-hitter. How many chickens could I get up there?"

With the chicken feature now permanently disabled, and Montreal baseball sure to follow, no one should ever break that chicken record, including Colonel Sanders. But just in case, we want to make sure the world knows about it.

The 1,000th Yankee
The Yankees don't boast much about Deshaies' career in pinstripes -- possibly because it lasted about 20 minutes (seven innings of 11.57 ERA work, to be exact) in 1984.

But when Deshaies was called up in September of that year, he just happened to assume his unique place in Yankees lore -- by being honored as the 1,000th player ever to play for the Yankees.

"So whatever Roy Oswalt might do down the road, he can't be the 1,000th Yankee," Deshaies concluded. "That's one I'm pretty sure I'll always have."

The left-handed rookie record
So Roy Oswalt broke that Astros rookie record, huh? Well, in an attempt to do damage control on losing that feat, Deshaies immediately figured out he still held the team record for left-handed rookies. Let's see Oswalt try to break that one.

"Carlos Hernandez will probably get that next year," Deshaies predicted. "But I'll still hold the record for left-handed rookies over 6 feet who came from outside the organization."

And we hope Hernandez is taking good notes on that, too.

The strikeout barrage
So who, would you guess, holds the major-league record for most consecutive strikeouts at the start of a game?

Nolan Ryan? Randy Johnson? Tom Seaver?

No, sir. It's our own Jim Deshaies, who really did punch out eight straight Dodgers (then failed to whiff the pitcher) to kick off a game on Sept. 23, 1986.

Fifteen years later, that mark still stands. At least until Roy Oswalt really gets his career in gear.

"That one hasn't even been threatened for a while," Deshaies said. "But I don't think I should talk about it. He might decide he wants to go ahead and do that, too."

The power outage
But of all of Jim Deshaies' many records, one stands above the rest.

In his distinguished offensive career, he racked up 373 at-bats -- and never once hit a double, a triple or a home run. No pitcher, no player, no batboy ever came to the plate that many times in the big leagues without figuring out a way to get at least one extra-base hit.

Now that, friends, is a big-time record. It's also one that's safe from challenge by Roy Oswalt. He already has a double.

"Boy, got rid of that in a hurry," Deshaies said. "Didn't he?"

But there's a certain irony to this mark -- because back in 1993, as Deshaies was closing in on the old record, held by legendary swatter Virgil "Bad Numbers" Barnes, he was asked what he knew about Virgil Barnes.

"I know," he replied, "that Virgil Barnes was very slow."

Still, Deshaies was, of course, honored to be mentioned in the same breath as him.

"We're an elite group," he said of himself and Virgil back then. "The only trouble is that 40 years from now, somebody's going to say, 'How do you feel being in the same company as Jim Deshaies?' And then they're going to have the same laugh on me we're having on Virgil Barnes. They'll be saying, 'Jim Deshaies? Who was that guy?' "

That was his quote, all right -- eight years ago: "Who was that guy?" So say what you want about Jim Deshaies, historic figure that he may be. But never say he didn't foresee that what goes around is always destined to come around.

20-20 visionary of the week
Thursday at Pac Bell Park, Barry Bonds crunched his 60th home run into the historic waters of McCovey Cove. Most of us in America thought that 60th homer was the biggest story in baseball that day.

Only one lovable lunatic we know saw that home run and thought: "Oh no. Albie Lopez gave it up. And now he might (gasp) lose 20 games."

That lovable lunatic was the legendary Brian Kingman (a.k.a., the Last 20-Game Loser of the 20th Century). And his main focus in life these days is trying to hang on to his dubious claim to fame forever -- or at least the next 3,000 years.

So what did Brian Kingman really think when Lopez gave up Bonds' 60th homer?

"I've gotta admit, my first thought was about Tracy Stallard," Kingman fessed up, "because he lost 20 games (in 1964) and he gave up Roger Maris' 61st homer (in 1961). I thought, 'Oh no. Is this an omen of things to come?'"

Is it? Heck, we don't know. But with Lopez and three other pitchers roaring down the stretch with a chance to lose 20, it's time for the latest update from Kingman on the 20-Loss Race:

Bobby Jones, Padres (8-17, 4.72). The favorite, at 3 to 1, Kingman says.

"The thing I can't figure out," Kingman said, "is whether he's got four starts left or five. He could sneak in a fifth if he starts on the last day of the season. But if he's at 19 (losses), why would he want to do that?"

Logical question. But after losing No. 17 this week, Jones announced he wasn't scared of losing 20 and wanted to make every one of his starts, no matter what. So that's got Kingman mortified enough that he plans to show up at Jones' start Sunday in Arizona to begin putting the hex on him.

"Usually, when I go to a park to watch one of these guys, no one should mind me coming there," he said, "because I'm going to root for their guy not to lose. But Sunday, I'm going to a game in Phoenix to root for a Padres guy not to lose. They might throw stuff at me. I'll have to sit way up in a corner of the bleachers or something."

So if you see some loner sitting in the last row in dark glasses, with no fans around him for six sections, yup. It's him.

Albie Lopez, Diamondbacks (8-17, 4.82) Even though he has as many losses as Jones, Lopez lost his 17th four days later. So Kingman makes him only 4 to 1.

Lopez remains the most unique candidate of the post-Kingman era, because 12 of his losses came in the American League. So he would be the first man to lose 20 while changing leagues in midseason since Roscoe Miller in 1902. But Lopez is also on a first-place team now. So the 20-game-loser watch isn't exactly his team's No. 1 priority.

"I got an email on this from a fan through my web site (www.20gamelosers.com)," Kingman reported. "He was saying, 'It seems to me the contenders ought to cultivate 19-game losers. They get up to 19 losses, then you start them -- because you know they can't lose, because nobody ever loses 20.' "

Good theory. But unfortunately for Brian Kingman, it comes with no money-back guarantees.

Jimmy Anderson, Pirates (6-16, 5.61). Starts Saturday. Kingman puts him at a very nervous 4 to 1.

"He's been the biggest person I've been terrified about," Kingman admitted, "because he's lost so many in a row (0-7 since July 22). But he had a big non-loss Saturday (a no-decision against Milwaukee). I was glued to the TV for that game."

Jose Mercedes, Orioles (7-16, 5.90). Starts Friday. Mercedes sneaked into the hunt by losing No. 16 last weekend, and can't be ruled out. So he, too, is 4 to 1 -- and a loss away from going to 3 to 1.

"The funny thing was," Kingman said, "I was so glad Anderson didn't lose last weekend, I forgot Mercedes was pitching. And now he's making me nervous. They're all making me nervous. But Mercedes is scaring me because he's losing so consistently (five of his last six starts, seven of his last nine). And that's what it takes to lose 20."

With all these candidates, Kingman can see this race heading for a dramatic, nerve-wracking conclusion. So what's his strategy? What else? He's waiting for the four voodoo dolls he ordered to arrive, so he can put the same hex on these four he enacted so successfully with Omar Daal last September.

"They're heading this way," he said of those voodoo dolls. "Now I've got to figure out what to do with them. My friends are saying I've got to get little jerseys with their names on it. But if I start doing that, in another decade, if nobody does it, I might end up with 30 or 40 voodoo dolls in my house. And that might be bordering on insanity."

Then again, bordering on insanity is what Brian Kingman does best. But it's made him a major national celebrity -- "at least for two weeks every September." So we promise to guard his borderlines for the entire month of September as best as Week in Review possibly can. Stay tuned.

Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com. Week in Review appears each Friday.