Hope you enjoyed that YouTube victory over the Blue Jays. I did because it means the Yankees put another game between them and Toronto. Yep the Yankees are surging - let's see what else is going on in the majors in the month since the All-Star break because god knows the Nats aren't that interesting.
AL East
The big story is in the middle of the division where the red-hot Yankees (22-8 in last 30) have passed the fumbling Red Sox (7-14 in last 21). But the biggest story might lie elsewhere. No certainly not with the Blue Jays who haven't been able to keep pace with New York and have fallen further out of the playoffs. And not even with the Rays who have continued to roll and have a solid lead and the best non NL-West record in the majors. No the biggest story might be the Orioles who not only are 0-13 in their last 13 games but are being crushed daily, being outscored 36-123 over this stretch.
You read that right.
AL Central
Nothing? I mean the White Sox have basically played .500 ball since the ASB but Cleveland hasn't managed that and Chicago has all but taken the division. Detroit has played some good ball and has some interesting pitchers and will probably find themselves #2 at some point.
AL West
The third best division in baseball? Probably so. Both Oakland and Seattle keep winning and have made up some ground on Houston, but the Astros had a big lead and haven't played all that bad themselves. The Mariners are a surprise but a 25-14 in one run game surprise not a team is actually good one. The Angels tread water as usual and the Rangers started 0-10 out the blocks and have been 7-22 in the second half. Tough division to suck in. See the Orioles.
NL East
You know this! The Nats traded off and collapsed. The Mets didn't trade off and also collapsed! The Phillies passed them first but have had a rough week and so the Braves who did a long W-L pattern for 16 games broke out of that by finally winning and they sit with a nice little lead. The Marlins who right before the break did some weird thing trading huge wins with lots of close losses and made themsevles look good run differential wise aren't that good and are back to showing that in a conventional way.
NL Central
The Cubs collapse has overshadowed the Brewers surge 20-8 since the break. After a brief stumble the Reds have played well 14-7 and are challenging for a Wild Card. The Cards are trying as well and are back in the WC race though with work to do. The Pirates? You know.
NL West
The Giants continue their magical season that will almost certainly be reversed next year. The Dodgers lost some ground but since the trades are 12-3 and are trying to chip away. The Padres? They have been under .500 since the break and 9-13 in the last 22 letting other teams crawl back into the WC2 hunt. Cincy is only 1.5 games out, Philly and St. Louis 4. The Rockies are bad and the D-backs are terrible though not as amazingly so anymore.
What to watch?
After the last Sox/Yanks game tonight, Oakland / White Sox is the best match-up on paper though Chicago doesn't have much to play for. Mets / Giants is interesting to see if the Mets can keep losing, Giants winning. This weekend brings the Mets to LA to continue that. In good team match-ups San Fran takes on Oakland, while the White Sox play the Rays. In a match-up that will probably decide if anything is actually there the Mariners face the Astros. And the one head to head over the same spot one the Padres and Phillies play.
Enjoy some good baseball this weekend! Just not the Nats who will likely be steamrolled in Milwuakee
16 comments:
I knew it--just knew it!--that you'd begin with your immortal beloved Yankees. As you should, to be honest.
(By the way, don't you find the AL races far more interesting than the NL's?)
Still, even though they've allowed marginally fewer runs--fewest in the division (!)--than the Jays, the Yankees have scored about 100 fewer. It's a big differential, but the Yanks recognized that and brought in two big bats (Gallo and Rizzo). So good on them.
One last thing: Correct me if I'm misreading or premature in concluding that contenders who acquired bats at the deadline are doing significantly better than those who went after arms.
Not every team, of course, but in general.
Wait, what about the most interesting factoid from last night???? :)
Tyler Clippard getting the save against the Phillies!
Age 36, he’s still getting it done! Clip and Save!
Serious question now: what happened to the Os? Why are they stuck in perpetual rebuild? How is it possible to be so bad this far into the rebuild?
I suppose you could ask the same thing about the Pirates…
Well, the Pirates have an easy answer; they refuse to spend money, and if you refuse to spend money you had better be the Rays or A's with regard to player development and identifying prospects. The Pirates seem to be a lot like the Royals sometimes in that they've favored close-to-ML players so as soon as their core group either aged up or got too expensive they didn't have the talent pipeline to replace them.
The O's...if they weren't holding up the Nats' MASN money despite losing every arbitration and court hearing they've come to out of sheer spite, I'd feel sorry for their towering incompetence, but as it is, I'll just resort to schadenfreude.
I cannot believe the MASN thing is still unsettled. Will Angelos' sons keep fighting against any attempt at streaming games on places like YouTube TV, etc? I am really tired of paying for cable to watch the Nats.
SM - Bats have a more immediate impact. Arms are really more for the playoffs, imo. Occasionally you'll have that Sabathia/Brewers year but there's only so much you can do every 5th day.
The NL Races do fall a little flat. The NL East race has bad teams, it's tough to straight care about a 2nd WC chase with non-rivals, and since the Dodgers won last year the Giants forcing them into the WC is meh. Yankees and Sox knocking eachother out is always fun. A's trying to keep Astros from an undeserved redemption tour is something we can all get behind.
GCX - But he's the best middle reliever of all-time. MIDDLE!
A deep dive into the Os? No thank you. In part I assume its a lack of financial support - you skip drafting a couple guys, don't go after a couple more in int'l draft. Don't sign anyone good even under short contracts that you might be able to flip for depth.
Egonadon - No team is going to give up cable. It's a huge chunk of their money because cable needs them because it keeps people like you corded. For example - the Padres are getting 50 mill a year plus money from part ownership of a cable channel. You think they can get a million people to pay $50 a year to watch the team? I don't think they believe they can.
The MASN deal is held up until Angelos dies basically. His son will sell - there will be some settlement with the Nats going to 50% ownership, or more likely freeing them to make their own channel - instead of paying them what's fully owed.
I don't really sympathize with the Nats. If you read between the lines the Nats and MLB had a handshake deal to screw the O's and force them to make that deal so the Nats would have their own channel even though that was the only way Angelos would give up his territorial rights*. They could have agreed to a standard arb to get cable money but instead made that play with MLB and gave the Os the opening to do all this. That's my take at least.
*if you think these are dumb I agree but also every owner holds onto this like a dog and a bone. Try to put a team in... I don't know Wilmington and see the Lerners drag out the lawyers.
When can we start to get hopeful about Kieboom turning it around?
Nats now have 4 Top 60 prospects:
https://www.mlb.com/prospects/top100/
The cupboard’s gettin’ fuller!
Another save against the Phillies for one of the best middle relievers in semi recent times!
Clip and Save x2! Double the value!
I find it funny that Gray is listed as the #54 prospect on MLBPipeline's list, while he's simultaneously the #1 starter in the team's current rotation and stands pretty much zero chance of seeing the minors again unless it's because his pitching dives southward.
(Have to love that Clippard is still out there pitching effectively...and that it's against the Phillies is doubly good.)
I wonder how long it'll be before we see Ruiz up in place of Barrera? (It's so weird to suddenly think of the Nats' organization as being deep in young catching.)
Couple of good points, Dezo. The first being the oddity of the organization suddenly being deep in catching.
The other is noting that Gray should no longer be considered a prospect. Of the three remaining, one (Ruiz) came over from another organization and another (House) is this year's first round draftee. That these acquisitions drove the Nats' organizational rankings upwards gives you some idea of how bad it was.
Or still is: In all the years I've been following this blog, one recurring theme is that organizations (and fans) tend to overvalue their prospects.
Just a cautionary note, that's all.
MLBPipeline followed up their new Top 100 list with each team's Top 30. A couple of notes:
* Gray, Adams, and Thompson are all listed in the Top 30, rounding out the list of MLB players.
* Including them, the overall ranking is 15th in the bigs. So our system has gone from garbage to officially being "meh."
* The amount by which it was the recent work that changed the status is elevated by the fact that of those top 30, 9 came from other organizations in our deadline moves and 3 more via this year's draft, which goes right to SM's points--both in terms of how weak we were before and how fast that list is going to plummet given the number of high-end players who are going to be removed from that list as they move to MLB status (including Ruiz at 1 and Gray at 4, with Adams at 14 and Thompson at 15. Patrick Murphy (19) also made the list and since he's 26 he's either going to end up in the MLB pen or as a AAAA non-prospect sooner rather than later. I wouldn't be surprised to see Cavalli(2) and Carillo (8) with the Nats in 2022 at some time, either... Still, the point of a farm system is to produce MLB players, and if we can get a few guys who are solid MLB regulars it'll go down as a successful deadline.
So, Dezo ... doesn't Branden Lionel Boissiere--a third-round pick who is suddenly the Nats' top 1st base prospect(!)--have a wonderful name that sounds like he should have been a mop-up reliever for, say, the 1970 Expos?
LOL! Don't know about the 1970s, but he sounds like the kind of guy who'd come in behind Bill Gullickson or Scott Sanderson on the 1980 Expos!
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