This has to be the dullest September for MLB ever. There are no real division races going on other than the annual Yanks Sox battle for 1st. Every other division the leader has a blow out lead that would be tough to lose with just over a monh left in the season.
Oh and Cubsfan says Cubssuck.
I was going to start this thread but was too bored to bother.
Even the addition of a fifth playoff team wouldn’t actually add much excitement. It seems a huge portion of the league is like 69-72.
Toronto is 70-71 and is 14th out of 30 in the ESPN power rankings, and you could argue they should be more like 12th. It’s just a handful of teams blowing everyone else away.
I hope it’s more like the calm before the storm. Maybe the playoffs will be epic instead.
It’s been a pretty boring MLB season in general. The Indians and Pirates were the surprise teams that made it interesting for longer than expected, but they eventually fizzled out. There are only 6 teams in the NL above .500 and you know there isn’t a team who will put up any kind of fight against Philly in the postseason.
As a Red Sox fan, I am far from confident that a playoff spot is secured. Seven games over the Rays with a few more games against them and the Yankees is no safe lead. Throw in an injured(?) Josh Beckett and a suddenly struggling offense and who knows. The pitching does not inspire confidence, either.
The AL west isn’t quite in the bag yet!
Go West, young man!
There’s a feeling I get when I look to the West–and that feeling is PENNANT FEVER!
Westward HO!
Arizona has to be a pretty good surprise.
The Tigers have just pulled away in the last couple weeks. The AL Central has been a good race til then.
LA and Texas are still at it.
The Red Sox and Yankees are not through either.
There is action for some.
there is always the huge collapse that devastates some team and scars their fans for generations.
On paper, the Giants shouldn’t have put up any kind of fight against Philly last year.
Sox vs. Yankees doesn’t do it for me since they’re both way ahead on the wild card scale. The East title is nifty from a bragging rights perspective, but they’ve both got an inside track to the big prize.
That, and I’ll just take a good ballgame any day. Standings and championships haven’t meant much to me since the Dodgers have sunk into their cesspool of wicked depravity. I just like to see some good baseball. Nureyev never looked as good as an infield turning a 3-6-1 double play.
Yeah, down just 2 1/2, the Angels are still too close to Texas for my tastes, especially since they finish with the last 3 in Anaheim.
The AL central should have really been fun to watch in September. The Twins, Sox, Tigers, and Indians should all have been within 5 of eachother at the end of August. But the Twins have just been awful all year, the Sox never got any consistency, and the Indians faded. Tigers win by default. hurrah.
I’ll be pulling for the Brewers come October.
I sort of follow the White Sox (they’re my wife’s favorite team), and I have no idea how they hung around as long as they did. Only Konerko and Pierzynski have been hitting well (and Pierzynski’s been out for weeks now), and they spent the entire first half of the season with two everyday players (Rios and Dunn) hitting at or below the Mendoza Line. The pitching has been fair, I suppose, and maybe that’s how they stayed in games.
Since the Giants are out of it this year, it is time for me to live in the past and point out that this is incorrect.
The 2010 Giants led all of baseball in ERA, BAA, strikeouts, saves, and save percentage.
Their ERA was .31 lower than the Phillies’, they notched 150 more strikeouts, and they gave up an 18 points lower average.
So what about offense?
In the regular season, the Phillies hit a whopping 4 (four) more home runs than the Giants.
This is despite the fact that the Giants play in a stadium which is significantly harder to hit home runs in, so arguably the Giants had the edge in power.
The Giants were not a lucky team: their true winning percentage was actually lower than their Pythagorean winning percentage.
The Phillies run differential was better than the Giants’ by 18… a small amount over a full season, especially considering that the Giants didn’t have their best team until later in the year.
Now look at this year:
The Phillies lead all of baseball in ERA.
The Phillies lead every NL playoff team by at least .32 in ERA (pretty much the same margin by which the Giants were ahead of the Phillies last year).
The Phillies’ run differential beats the second best team (Brewers) by 109.
Compare that to last year, when the Phillies’ run differential was better than the Giants by only 18. The gap is 6 times bigger this year.
Bigger upsets have happened. I’d bet on the Phillies. But I wouldn’t bet anything I couldn’t afford to lose.
Phils AND BoSox fan here. Yes, we already know who the wild cards are, but what about Cleveland or Detroit?
And the Diamondbacks? Seriously? NL West is terrible anyway. And the AL West? I’m closet rooting for the Angels to take out Texas. If the Rangers make it to the postseason, I think they might be in the WS again. Also watch out for Milwaukee.
Cleveland is 7.5 games back in the standings and currently down 5-0 in the 2nd inning to Detroit. They’ve only got five games left against the Tigers this season (including tonight). So while they are not absolutely dead in the water right now, they need to win those five games, at the very least.
And they’ve certainly got an uphill battle tonight.
ETA: Make that 6-0, now, with Carmona out of the game after 1.1 innings.
I respectfully beg to differ that the Tigers are winning the division by default. They have been laying a pounding down on their division rivals (and are leading the Tribe 8-1 as I write this).
And have Verlander going tomorrow against Cleveland.
mmm
I think the Brewers will give Philly a hard time.
Mariano Rivera is (very quietly) 4 saves from the all-team lead.
Agree with this. Cleveland came to town Aug. 19, about 1.5 games back. With today’s win, since then the Tigers have won 16 of 20, including 9-0 against Cleveland and Chicago, the two teams chasing them.