What do Baltimore, Kansas City, Oakland, Florida, St. Louis, and Arizona have in common? No, they are not all stops on George Michael's comeback tour this summer (anyone who pays for that is an idiot). These are the teams that currently reside at the top of their respective divisions two weeks into the long baseball season. Of course it is too early, who can forget the Nationals magical run in the first half of the 2005 season. On July 25 the Nationals were tied with the Braves for first place (after leading for several weeks) in a weak NL East, before going on to finish in the cellar, nine games back. In that same season, the Baltimore Orioles were in first place in the always tough AL East, four games ahead of the utterly irritating Boston Red Sox on June 1. By season's end, they were in fourth, 22 games behind the super annoying Yankees. The point is, things will change. The Royals will not continue to pitch lights out (a league best 2.46 ERA, almost a run better than the Diamondbacks and Cardinals). The Tigers will start hitting (a pitiful, league low 33 runs scored thus far). And the Mets will start winning (the health of the rotation is question mark). The Not-So Crappy Cardinals continue to pitch well and hit well enough to win, making their 9-4 start a truly pleasant surprise to yours truly.A few other not-so bold predictions for this season, Jason Kendall (.405) and AJ Pierzynski (.421) will not win their respective league's batting titles. Justin Germano (0.00), Cliff Lee (0.61), Edwin Jackson (0.64), Ryan Dempster (0.69), Zack Greinke (0.75), Cole Hamels (0.82), Brian Bannister (0.86), and Kyle Lohse's (1.04) collective assault on Bob Gibson's 1.13 ERA will last about another five minutes. And Ryan Ludwick will neither finish the year hitting closer to .350 than .250 nor with a slugging percentage higher than Pujols (.800 to Pujols' .707). Random point that makes one's head spin-Justin Upton has yet to turn 21.
For more inane musings on baseball, see LWAL's resident baseball insider here.
1 comment:
This season has just been weird, weird, weird. Good teams will bounce back, and bad teams will reveal themselves. In between will be a couple surprises, should be fun to see who those turn out to be.
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