I’m in my mid-20’s. One of my oldest memories is vomiting on the fans in front of me at a Pirate’s game at the old Three Rivers Stadium (I guess I knew they sucked back then, too). Anyway, Pirates have never been relevant my entire life. They haven’t had a winning season that I can remember. And the past three years have been absolutely agonizing. They really are putting together the groundwork for trying, I can see that. They haven’t traded away the best prospects for a handful of balloons, or sold McCuchen for a meatball hoagie, for instance. But last year they had that ridiculous call after which they imploded, and this year they seem to have just given up for the fun of it. I honestly don’t expect them to finish above 500, either, which would be incredible. They finish the season by playing the Cubs and Astro’s like 20 times each - and they just lost to the Astro’s 5-1! The Astro’s aren’t even a baseball team at this point, it’d be harder to lose against 11 guys in stilts wearing Uncle Sam suits.
And this season their highlight reel had actual highlights!
Oakland 77-60
Baltimore 77-61
Tampa Bay 76-62
LA/Anaheim/OC 75-63
It is entirely possibly we could end up with a four-way Wild Card playoff.
How do they handle this? Suppose one team ends up with 89 wins and the others with 88 wins. Do the 3 88-win teams have to do a three-team playoff to do the wild card game with the 89-win team? Or do they organize a four-team playoff? That would be awesome.
I’m no expert, and I don’t write articles, but I’m sure the tenor of my SDMB posts about the Orioles for most of this season reflected my expectation that they were gonna sink back below .500 anytime now, and stay there.
Boy, I sure nailed that one, didn’t I?
(Sure, they theoretically could still finish under .500, but they’d have to go 3-21 or worse the rest of the way to do that. After 15 years, Davey’s Curse is finally broken.)
I keep saying they’ve got an anti-gravity machine tucked away in their locker room.
Stras’ performance in Friday’s game is exactly why I support the shutdown. He’s become really inconsistent of late, which is the same thing that happened to Zimmermann last year. Not only is it in the team’s long term interest to shut down Stras, it is in the team’s short term interest as he is currently not reliable, IMHO.
While my main concern has been with the Orioles, i’ve been keeping an eye on the Pirates for the past month or so, and have been disappointed by their collapse. They’ve gone 12-21 since the beginning of August.
I was hoping that this might be the year that both the Orioles and the Pirates would break their string of sub-500 seasons, and maybe even make the playoffs. Barring a historic collapse, the Orioles will comfortably beat 81 wins, and are in with a good shot at the playoffs. The Pirates should still crack .500, and they still have a shot at the playoffs, but they haven’t looked, over the past few weeks, like a team that’s in contention.
It would be nice if Pittsburgh and Baltimore’s long-suffering baseball fans could both have something to cheer about this year. One consolation, though, is that a lot of Pirates fans are also Steelers fans, so their misery is something i can live with.
Speaking of the Astros, they’re now up to 43 wins, so they only need one more to be clear of the '03 Tigers; they need only 2 more road wins to tie and 3 to beat the worst-ever road record. With a bit of luck, they’ll just be dismal instead of historically bad.
The amazing thing (to me, at least) is that they were 22-23 earlier in the season. Of course, they immediately lost 8 games in a row after that and are a whopping 21-72 since. :eek:
Since they’re apparently completely serious about ending Strasburg’s season within the next week, it really doesn’t make any sense to wait, as I’ve said before. They really should be able to hold off the Braves without him, and they need to get used to being the team they’re going to be in the postseason.
Nats come from behind to beat the Marlins (and mathematically eliminate them from the NL East race), Braves pummel the Mets to stay 6.5 back, O’s hold off the Yankees to tie things up again in the AL East, and the Angels are making a late charge for a wildcard spot in the AL.
If the O’s can win the division, there’s a chance that the Yankees might wind up out of the postseason altogether.
After being beaten last night, the Orioles won another 1-run game tonight, holding on to beat the Yankees 5-4 and joining them at the top of the division.
Because it was the end of the game, the MLB coverage didn’t show a replay of the Yankees’ last out, a double play that finished with Teixeira out at first. Tex was pretty unhappy with the call, and at full speed it certainly looked like he might have had a case. I’d love to see a slow-mo replay from a better angle. If he had been called safe, the game would have been tied, because a runner came home from third on the play.
Ugh, it wasn’t even that close. Maybe the ump blew it because of the slide.
If Sabathia isn’t going to pitch like an ace, I don’t think the Yankees are going very far anyway. The starting pitching is pretty thin. The Orioles are playing like it’s the playoffs; the Yanks look like they are in spring training.
Okay, here’s something I was messing around with in a fantasy situation. Sometimes I dream up weird crap like this. Say that the MLB was organized into five divisions of six teams each, and the teams were assigned to each division by how old they were. So the six oldest teams would be in a division together, etc. So, assume that they have their current win-loss records and assume that there will still be 10 teams in the playoffs (the top two in each division.)
So let’s see what the standings look like (two things: I had to make choices in assigning divisions when there were too many franchises of the same age, and since this is fantasy, I renamed the teams whose names annoy me because teams should be named after cities, and not states or regions)
So here’s the table. Any interesting matchups? Is your team doing better or worse? Who’s getting an unfair advantage? Who’s getting a fair bump?:
1871 DIVISION
Cincinnati Reds .596
Atlanta Braves .574
St. Louis Cardinals .536
Pittsburgh Pirates .518
Philadelphia Phillies .489
Chicago Cubs .386
1883 DIVISION
San Francisco Giants .561
Baltimore Orioles .557
Chicago White Sox .540
Los Angeles Dodgers .529
Detroit Tigers .525
Cleveland Indians .421
1901 DIVISION
Dallas Rangers .593
Oakland Athletics .568
New York Yankees .564
Los Angeles Angels .550
Boston Red Sox .447
Minneapolis Twins .414
1962 DIVISION
Washington Nationals .614
Kansas City Royals .450
Milwaukee Brewers .493
San Diego Padres .468
New York Mets .464
Houston Astros .314
1977 DIVISION
Tampa Rays .550
Phoenix Diamondbacks .489
Seattle Mariners .475
Toronto Blue Jays .460
Miami Marlins .447
Denver Rockies .406
I stipulated that it’s fantasy. Your nitpicks are overruled. (The operating rule is that the team should be named for the chief city in its metro, so you could make a case for San Francisco Athletics, but I let that slide.)
