Traded Sets Baseball Challenge: Week 1

Contest time!

I'm going to be holding a weekly contest here with some nice prizes.

This is how it works. Each week (usually Mondays but I'm a little slow this week) I will post 4 games from the upcoming weekend. See below for this week's games. To enter the contest, you just need to post a comment containing the following info:

• Your guess of the winning pitcher for each game
• Your guess of anyone in the game who will hit a home run for either team

You get 1 point for each winning pitcher you correctly guess, as well as 1 point for each home run hitter you correctly guess.

The person with the highest point total wins the weekly contest.

Here are some rules about how I'll be running this contest:

• In the event of a tie, the winner will be the person who posted their comment earlier. But I might just send prizes to everybody too.
• I will be posting the listed/projected starting pitchers for the games. If something happens and those guys don't start, too bad for you. It's your job to pay attention to the news and see if some team is going to change their starter for some reason.
• In the event of a rainout, I will use the makeup game, as long as it happens by Monday. For example, if I listed a Saturday game that gets rained out and it's played on Sunday as part of a double-header, I'll use the game that was added on Sunday and count that as the Saturday game. If instead the game is added later in the season, then that game will be dropped from the contest entirely for that week.
• Only your first entry counts. So perhaps you want to wait a little while to see who the starters are going to be, but also remember that the earlier entries win tiebreakers. Hmm...decisions, decisions.
• Entries must be made by Saturday morning, before all the games start.
  

So, what are the prizes? Well, there is a regular weekly prize as well as a jackpot. Read through.

The regular weekly prize will be some number of cards of my choosing--anywhere from 5 to 50 cards. I will try to tailor them to meet your interests.

The jackpot is a bonus. Each week, I am going to add something special to the jackpot. If anybody gets a perfect score (with no rainouts or otherwise canceled games), they win the jackpot. If nobody gets a perfect score, then the jackpot carries through and I will add something the next week. Cool, huh?


So, ok, here we go with the Week 1 games. Make your picks below in the comments.

All games scheduled for Saturday April 11 with projected starters listed:

Game #1: Pirates at Reds (Maholm vs Owings)
Winning pitcher: ?
HR hitter: ?

Game #2: Red Sox at Angels (Penny vs Saunders)
Winning pitcher: ?
HR hitter: ?

Game #3: Yankees at Royals (Sabathia vs Ramirez)
Winning pitcher: ?
HR hitter: ?

This week you can earn a maximum of 6 points.

This week's item being added to the jackpot is the 1988 Score Rookies & Traded set that I blogged about here.