Inside the Majors

Archive for July, 2010

With the announcement of the latest location for Major League Baseball’s Mid-summer Classic, a lot of the country’s bigger cities and historic stadiums are openly questioning the commissioner’s decision.  The 2012 All-Star Game will be played in Kansas City, Missouri, home of the one of the league’s most consistent teams.  Year in and year out the Royal’s are among the most predictable teams in baseball, setting the City of Fountains abuzz with a few mid-level acquisitions before tanking to the bottom of the AL Central a few weeks into the season. Read the rest of this entry »

Were you to up and ask any baseball manager what’s wrong with Tampa Bay’s team, you’d be swiftly greeted with a perplexing and a choice-word evaluation of your own baseball assessing talents.  By many accounts, the Rays sport one of the most complete line-ups in baseball, featuring a rare top to bottom combination of speed and power.  Complete with a spry selection of still-developing young players bolstered by the experience of savvy veterans, Tampa Bay really knows how to fill up a stat sheet even the Sabremetrics guys won’t scoff at, including the most important statistic: winning percentage.  Close behind the Yankees atop the ever competitive AL East, Tampa is off to a very solid 45-32 start.  So what then would dare cause anyone to assume the Rays have anything wrong at all?

Delving deeper into the matter, this amateur diagnoses concludes the Rays currently suffer from what, for lack of an official medical term, we can only refer to as “Happy Gilmore Putting Syndrome.” Stuart Sternberg, the team’s principle owner, is probably just one more lethargic home-stand short of screaming, “That’s your home! Are you too good for your home?!” Tampa Bay has compiled an untouchable 25-13 road mark, tops in the bigs.  While it is reassuring to know your team is resilient enough to win in unfriendly confines, the flip side of this impressive stat is their alarmingly average 20-19 home total.  Looking up and down the standings, the Blue Jays, Athletics, Mariners and Nationals all boast better home records, and that’s just teams playing.500 baseball or worse.  Read the rest of this entry »