As a fantasy baseball owner, are you kind of like Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis?

You know, the kind of owner who will try reclamation projects. The kind of owner that doesn't care what a player does off the field, just the stats he puts up on it. One little arrest doesn't stop that kind of owner.

If that's you, About.com fantasy baseball contributing writer Kevin Kleps has a guy in mind for you this week in his weekly Waiver-Wire Pickups column. (Hint: He's not exactly welcome in Cincinnati-area Macy's stores.)

Also to help you with your fantasy lineup, the Weekly Planner looks at five guys who are off to slow starts, but seem to be picking up a little steam. Who stars and who sits in Week 4?

The 1918 World Series is one of the most memorable World Series for a few reasons. The tradition of performing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at sporting events began with this series, which took place at the tail end of of World War I. Babe Ruth won Game 1 of the series as a pitcher, throwing a shutout. And Red Sox fans knew 1918 as a battle cry for their 86-year World Series curse, which famously ended in 2004.

But for those of you who believe in curses in baseball, that 1918 series might have started a doozy. The 1918 World Series was most recent playoff series between the most cursed teams in baseball -- the Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox -- and more and more people are beginning to believe that, like the infamous Black Sox Series a year later, it was fixed, but by the Cubs.

A 2009 book by the Sporting News' Sean Deveney -- "The Original Curse" -- got the flame started. And the Chicago History Museum recently unearthed a deposition taken from pitcher Eddie Cicotte, one of the ringleaders of the Black Sox a year later.

Cicotte, from the deposition:

"I am making this statement of my own free will and accord without any promise of award of any kind or description.The way it started, we were going east on the train. The ball players were talking about somebody trying to fix the National League ball players or something like that in the World's Series of 1918. Well anyway there was some talk about them offering $10,000 or something to throw the Cubs in the Boston Series. ... Somebody made a crack about getting money, if we got into the series, to throw the series. ..."

Given how powerful the gambling interests were at that point in history and how little the players were paid, it does seem plausible -- if not inevitable -- that the 1919 World Series wasn't the first one that was infiltrated by gamblers. Deveney's book floated the theory, and he has lots of evidence behind him. This deposition certainly backs him up.

The White Sox's drought reached 88 years before they won another World Series, in 2005. It took 86 years for Boston, of course. And the Cubs... they're still waiting, of course. If they don't win this fall, it will be 103 years and counting.

Forget about billy goats and trading Babe Ruth to the Yankees. Were these "curses" brought about by fixing games?

Related: Biggest Curses in Baseball History

It's been a busy week for Bud Selig, taking over the Los Angeles Dodgers and all. He took some time to talk to members of the Associated Press Sports Editors on Thursday.

Two pieces of reasonably big news news came out of that. First, Selig won't be banning Barry Bonds from the Hall of Fame or put any asterisks on his records, a la Ford Frick and Roger Maris.

"In life there's always got to be pragmatism," Selig said. "I think that anybody who understands the sport understand exactly why."

Then he addressed the postseason format, saying he expects more teams in the playoffs, starting in 2012. No real new news there. (You make the call: Should the playoffs expand?)

"I would say we're moving to expanding the playoffs, but there's a myriad of details to work out," Selig said. "Ten [teams] is a fair number."

And on being the temporary owner of the Dodgers (without going into much detail, as Frank McCourt is likely to file suit to try to regain control), to the Los Angeles Times:

"I thought a lot about it," he said. "I went back and looked at a lot of things, including some things that happened in my career. I said a couple weeks ago that people said this Texas thing [when the league facilitated the sale of the Rangers] was awful, and I said at the time that we'll work our way through. And I believe we'll work our way through this thing. That's life."

This week marks the 30th anniversary of one of the most remarkable games in baseball history.

On April 19, 1981, the Triple-A affiliates of the Boston Red Sox and Baltimore Orioles began an International League game on a cold, windy night in Pawtucket, R.I.

Two future Hall of Famers were on opposite sides: Wade Boggs for the Pawtucket Red Sox and Cal Ripken Jr. for the Rochester Red Wings. That wasn't what made the game special, as they combined to hit .240 that evening.

Boggs and Ripken were a big part of the longest game in the history of baseball: 33 innings. The first 32 innings were played that night, until the game was suspended at 4 a.m. local time, with the score deadlocked at 2.

"It's the only time I ever remember our postgame meal being breakfast." said Ripken, according to the Orioles Buzz blog. He was 2 for 13 in the game (and, of course, never came out of the game).

The game started with an attendance of 1,740, dwindled to 19 on the frigid night, and then resumed on June 23 with a crowd of 5,800. The resumed game lasted one inning, when Dave Koza drove in Marty Barrett with a single to end the game in the bottom of the 33rd. According to a Yahoo! Sports post, 14 single-game professional records were set during the game, including most at-bats (219), most strikeouts (60) and most pitches thrown (882).

"It comes up after 30 years quite a bit," Koza said recently to the Attleboro, Mass., Sun Chronicle. "It just doesn't seem possible - either that it happened, or that it was 30 years ago."