In past years, the AL East owned the most interesting divisional race in baseball. And while the Yankees and Red Sox are at it again this year, they won’t be the race to watch. The AL Central race is simply fascinating, as the Tigers and the White Sox have the top two records in the majors and will battle until the end. But which team will emerge as the divisional champions? And which has the better shot at walking away with the title? Both are excellent, but one team has the edge.
Category: MLB General
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Midseason Baseball Checkpoint
This is my midseason baseball checkpoint. In this article, I speculate about trades and who will make the playoffs.
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"Rule 5": The Golden Rule
by Matt Wells
Thanks to the All-Star game this past Tuesday, the name of Florida Marlin second baseman Dan Uggla was thrown around a lot. Uggla joined a list of numerous players over the years to be chosen via the Rule 5 draft. He became the first Rule 5 draft selection to become an All-Star in his first big-league season.
The success of Uggla, the Rule 5 castoff taken from the Diamondbacks, has had people scratching their heads. They’re not scratching their heads at Uggla’s success; they’re scratching their heads about the draft rule.
What is the Rule 5 draft? Read on…
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MLB Predictions: Part II
The second half of the Major League Baseball Season is underway, and it’s safe to say the first half had its share of surprises. What are the Detroit Tigers doing on top of the A.L. Central? What are the Cleveland Indians doing in fourth place? What are the Atlanta Braves, winners of 14 straight N.L. East titles doing…well…not in first?!
Down the stretch, don’t expect any less excitement. In fact, with every team in both of the West divisions still in the hunt, the Yankees and Red Sox fighting it out again, and trade deadline deals still to be made, you can expect even more excitement than the first half held.
This is how the divisions will play out:
Remember being in school? Summer vacations all to yourself, no homework, not a care in the world. Except of course, that one thing that looms over your freedom: the report card from the previous school year, lingering in the mail somewhere between the school and your home, just waiting to be received by judging parents.
Well, that time has come for the 30 teams of Major League Baseball, and some teams have a long, boring summer ahead, and some pissed off parents. Based on current standings, pre-season expectations, payroll and a variety of other credentials, here are the midseason report cards for the MLB.
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Rivals by Matt Waters
The All Star Break has indeed arrived, providing it’s usual prompt for differing opinions on a variety of mundane topics, ranging from how exactly home field advantage should be tabulated in the Fall Classic, to whether every single team should have it’s respective existence justified with an All Star selection. The answers to these questions are relatively simple, but it doesn’t stop the media from pondering philosophical for days on end.
[By the way, there is no right way to determine home field advantage in the World Series. The prevailing argument at this current unstable juncture calls for the team with the best record to be awarded home field, but even that seemingly sane opinion can be easily challenged: If an NL team has the superior record in this particular season, their dominance would definitely include a caveat, that being success reaped over inferior competition. I say give it to the League who won the Inter-League battle. If nothing else, it would annoy pessimistic purists to a laughable boiling point. Always a worthwhile exercise.]
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RPI Index All Stars – AL and NL
By Ryan McGowan
I devised a system of ranking players in each league based on their relative standing within their league in ten offensive categories: batting average, home runs, runs batted in, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, bases on balls, doubles, stolen bases, runs, and hits. I then looked to the inspiration of the college football and basketball polls for the scoring system; a first-place ranking in any one of the categories gets a player 10 points, a second-place ranking is worth 9, all the way down to 1 point for a tenth place ranking in their league.
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The Young-Stars Team
There is a new generation of baseball players coming up and they have taken the baseball world by storm. Move over Barry Bonds, Randy Johnson and Mike Piazza. Here comes Cabrera, Kazmir and Mauer.
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MLB Power Rankings for July 6th- 2006
The All-Star Game is upon us, which means it’s time for all the stuff that goes along with it: the homerun derby, the battle for homefield advantage, and of course, this year’s edition of the timeless discussion on the snubs and the all-stars who don’t deserve to be (or the Mark Redman Award).
This year’s Midsummer Classic also provides us with something else to enjoy: finally a game in Pittsburgh worth watching.
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A Whole New Ballgame
I have been thinking about the ‘problem’ of performance-enhancing drugs for a while now. With people like Barry Bonds and Jason Grimsley consistently re-opening the topic after something they do or something they say, I am getting tired of hearing about all of the players who use these substances and have little patience for the media’s treatment of them – what usually consists of two or three days of coverage of them and then, well, nothing. We need to accept the fact that we have come to a time where steroids and human growth hormone are a fact of life. These performing enhancing drugs are probably never going away.