...And Down The Stretch They Come! MLB enters the home stretch

I just finished watching the Braves win with a walk-off home run from Justin Upton, and while baseball is still fresh in my brain, and before I switch my brain into English Premier League mode, I feel like I should type about baseball.  I think it's time to take a look around the leagues quick and see what's up.  

But before we look at the standings, remember Antonio Alfonseca?  That dude had six fucking fingers.  

Anyway...

 Fun.

Prediction for the AL?  I think it ends up being exactly as it is right now.  Perhaps Oakland will win the west, and Texas makes the wild card game, but that's about all I'd change.  

National League!!!!

Also fun, but maybe not as fun.  

The Dodgers and Braves have insurmountable leads.  The Reds are surging, the Cardinals are bleeding and the Pirates are hanging in there.  To me, the National League is a five team race already.  It will end up exactly how it is, and that's the way it should be.  Arizona has no business in the postseason this year. Neither do the Gnats.  

Three quarters of the season is over already.  I'm not one to advocate the watching of American League games often, but now I must do so.  There's just so much left to be decided out there.  Alright, have a good day, and go Arsenal! 

One Tenth Done: My Reactions to MLB 2013 in April

We have played one tenth of the Major League Baseball season.  What we just watched, we'll just do that nine more times, and the season will be over before you even realized,

Some say that September wins are more important than April wins, and that may be true, a baseball team can really change complexions over the course of a season, but September wins will surely have a lot less pressure applied to them if you can get more wins in April.  Teams that get off to a hot start have a much easier path to the post season than teams that start slow and have to play catch-up all season.  Sometimes it works in the favor of the team with the slow start, but if you don't get up off the mat soon enough, you can be cooked by mid June.

One team that I recall getting off to a slow start and getting their act together was the 2005 Houston Astros.  If you remember, that team made it to the World Series against the White Sox that year.  A lot was made of their 15-30 start to the season, and I always since then check the standings at the 45 game mark, and see who is around that record at that time.  I look at that team and think, if the Astros could do it, anyone can.  So just because a team gets off to a slow start, doesn't mean their season is necessarily cooked.

The Tigers last year had a slow start, and were trying to catch the White Sox all year, and they did.  That was a good team that was underachieving early.  The 2005 Astros were a decent team, as well, a team that, if I remember correctly, had been in the playoffs the season prior.  They were expected to be good and started slow.  That's the difference between them and, lets say for example, the 2013 Houston Astros.  What a mess.  But it's not a surprise that the Astros are terrible, everyone knew they were going to be at the start of the season.  So the fact that they're bringing up the rear in the standings in the American League is no surprise at all.  Don't expect a miracle run out of these guys.

I tend to focus on the terrible teams in baseball because I feel bad for that teams fans.  I'm also very grateful that that team has never been my team.  I have this sick fascination with poor baseball teams, because it doesn't take much to be really bad.  Every team is pretty good.  Every baseball team since baseball has had a season that we record and recognize has won at least 40 games in a season.  And there is always fans in the stands.  It just amazes me that there were any fans in the stands at all for the 2003 Detroit Tigers season. Why would you waste your time?  It's just fascinating.

So 16 games (or so) into the 2013 season, we're starting to see who is good and who is not.  It's never for sure at this stage, but you can start to see it.  The Braves and Nationals are for real.  The Cubs and Marlins are really, really bad.  That's easy.  We all knew that going into this.  But it's the American League that I find really intriguing.  The AL east standings look like 2007.  The West looks like...well, not what I was exactly thinking, and the Central looks really mixed up.  I thought the Red Sox were going to be bad this year?  And I didn't think the Yankees had much of anything?  How are they the tops of the East?For the record, I wasn't drinking the Blue Jays kool-aid.  I just figured basically switch the Sox and the O's and you'd have what I expected.  But who gives a shit what I expect?  That's why they play the games.  It's early, and the difference between the last place Jays and first place Sox is only six games.  Same thing with the last place Indians and first place Royals, which is only 2.5 games.  There's still a lot of shaking out to do.  It's still too early to really say for sure who's who in the AL, but it surely feels like a different year over there.  Too bad I don't watch American League games.

More on that subject....very soon!

Go Baseball!

P.S. I've seen two instances of paper planes being flown onto the field in Toronto this season.  What's up with that?

Baseball Will Crush Your Soul With Pain and Agony

If you have followed baseball the past couple seasons, you should know that no lead in the standings is safe.  One team may seam nearly assured of upcoming post season action, and have it slip away in just a few short weeks, or days, even. Let's take a look at some of the recent collapses around the end of the season.

Exhibit A:  The 2007 New York Mets

This is one of the most LOL-worthy collapses in baseball history.  The Mets held a seven-game lead in the NL east on September 12th, and proceeded to lose 12 of their last 17 games and miss the playoffs altogether.  They lost five out of six against the horrible Nationals, and then, just when they had a chance to stave off this unreal collapse, all they had to do was beat the last place Florida Marlins on the last day of the season...and got smoked 6-1. The Phillies won the division, and the Mets went home.





Exhibit B: The 2009 Detroit Tigers

Oof.  Painful, this one was.  The Tigers were atop the Central for the better part of the season, and when it came down to the final weekend of the season, they held a three-game lead on September 30th.  By October 6th, just six days later, their season was Chinese food.  They were cooked cat.  They were delicious, I heard.  But at least out of the disaster that the collapse, we got Game 163, one of the best baseball games of all time.  Ups and downs, drama, extra innings, heroes left and right.  Good times.  And then the Twins got squashed by the Yankees, the eventual champs, but you know, that's not important here.  What's important is that even on the last weekend of the season, anything can and will happen.

Exhibit C: The 2011 Atlanta Braves and Boston Red Sox

And this one stings the worst of them all.  I can poke fun these other teams failures, but when it happens to my own team, my beloved Braves, it's no goddamn laughing matter, goddamn it.

Yup.  10 1/2 game lead on August 26th.  Still at 8 1/2 on September 6th, yet only went 9-18 in September. The final blow came on a blown save against the Phillies on that historic last day of the regular season.  I remember now why I hate the Phillies.  I tried as hard as I could to block this whole thing from my memory, but now that I'm writing about it, the wounds are still open, even if I've covered them with bandages for the time being.  I barely watched the rest of the post season because I was so jaded.  The Cardinals beat the Astros that day, and won the National League wild card.  The Braves went home.  UUUUGGGHHHH...however the spotlight on the Braves failure was dimmed a bit because it was being shared by another historic collapse.  Red.  Sox.  Nation.

As far as the Red Sox go, that might have been even worse than the Braves, actually.  They blew a nine-game lead over the Rays with 25 left to play.  That's huge.  Huge huge huge.  Also, on that last day of the season, the one I called historic in the above paragraph, the Red Sox were playing the nearly 100-loss team in the Baltimore Orioles, and all they had to do was win, and lost on a walk-off single.  Meanwhile, in Tampa, the Rays were playing the Yankees.  The Yankees took a 7-0 lead into the 8th inning, for cryin' out loud.  The Rays mounted a miraculous comeback of the ages, culminating in Dan Johnson's game-tying one-strike away from season over, home run.  Then Evan Longoria hit a solo shot in the 12th, just minutes after that Baltimore dagger to the heart of Red Sox Nation. The Rays were in and the Sox were out.  Unbelievable.  Hell, I'm mostly writing this as a way for me to remember what happened on that day.  All this stuff in the AL east, coupled with the Braves v.s. Phillies, and the Cardinals needing a win to keep their hopes of the post season alive, it's just incredible that this all happened at once.  And out of all of that, the least dramatic of the dramatic stuff was the Cardinals, and they ended up winning the whole thing...and they barely made the playoffs.  Insanity.

So if this season finishes anything close to what we got last season, we're in for quite a ride.  I can only hope it goes the right way this year, and these Braves don't screw it up this time.  But even if they do, the wounds will eventually heal, and I'll have a great blog post to write, won't I?