Greetings

Just a quick hello to welcome you to my summer hobby. From early September to early April, my primary focus in hounding autographs is hockey. To date, the collection stands at 1,275 pucks. It'll grow, too, with each season.

In my downtime, roughly defined from whenever the Tampa Bay Lightning are bounced from the NHL playoffs through the opening week of training camp in September, I'll keep my hounding skills sharp by cherry-picking certain players -- current and retired -- as their teams visit St. Petersburg to play the Tampa Bay Devils Rays.

Going forward, you can expect postings detailing successes and failures, funny moments and the occasional musings about life and sports.

Unlike my primary hockey blog, Hound Central 2.0, Baseball Mondays won't have daily briefings. In fact, the hope is to limit publications to, yes, you guessed it, Mondays. I will say, though, that the first entry will likely focus on the Minnesota Twins. Besides players like Torii Hunter, Joe Mauer and Johan Santana, the team's announcers include former big leaguers Bert Blyleven, Dan Gladden and Jack Morris.

Check back next Monday. You'll see how I did.