Last week my much anticipated 2008 hometown league season of Strat-O-Matic began.

As I have written a number of times, I really love both my teams:  The NL Berkeley Liberators and the AL El Cerrito Mountaineers.

As the only owner of each team, I drafted them from scratch. In the case of the Liberators, I started playing Strat again after more than a 20-year layoff, and well, I made some mistakes as I relearned and reaquainted myself with the game.

For example, I needed a catcher and a closer in 2003, so I swapped Todd Helton to Dean Peterson for Mike Piazza and Armando Benitez. Now, in a deep league, filling two spots for one is a good move.

And, in Strat-O-Matic land, Piazza was a plus-five arm, and it did not take me too many games into the 2004 season to realize what a fatal mistake that was.

So, it was back to the drawing board with the Liberators, but, with the Mountaineers--and our AL started in 2006--I was able to invoke the lessons learned and by last season my team was a serious contender, winning our AL West division and making the post season.

Meantime the Liberators had undergone enough cosmology that they too had solid everyday players, a good bench, and four very good starting pitchers with a decent enough pair of fifth guys and a pair of closers.

Still, the Mountaineers were beyond promising to me belief, while the Liberators were merely promising.

Well, after seven home games, the Liberators sit at 6-1, while the Mountaineers are 4-3. And, though I have not heard any away scores for the Liberators yet, the Mountaineers are 2-5.

Now, I also understand it takes a few games and some tweaking before we can really see the optimal lineup and platoon situations for our Strat-O teams, but I have also noticed that it only takes a few actual games to be able to see a hole.

Like that with Piazza behind the dish my team was toast. Or, that last year the Liberators, good at every position spot, simply did not have enough good starting pitching to really be competitive. So, I traded for Greg Maddux, Oliver Perez, and Jason Marquis, and this year, with incumbant Jake Peavy and the combo of Kevin Correia and Rick Vanden Hurk, that rotation is solid.

With Curt Schilling and Mike Mussina anchoring my AL staff, I knew I had to make the staff younger, so during the off-season I swapped Schilling as part of a good package that netted me Matt Cain, and then I traded for David Bush.

But, behind Cain, and #2 starter Gil Meche, are Bush, Mussina, and Lenny DiNardo, and well as is, those guys are unlikely to take me all the way no matter how good my hitting is (and it is good).

Worse, I have good relief, but all my set-up guys are lefties (how did that happen?) so I am in the process of swapping a couple of my lefty arms for the likes of Rudy Seanez and Michael Wuertz.

And that should help, as I think the Mountaineers will still prove to be more than competitive, especially as the season and our player limitations begin to take shape.

But, what is interesting is how easy, once the season began, it was to spot such a hole (it took me only a couple of games).

The question now is how easily I can remedy the situation.