My only real complaint is that once you figure out what you’re doing, this game is way too easy. Oh sure, you won’t homer off the best pitchers, but you can just chip everything they throw off to the side and usually get it past the foul zone. Some of the AI pitchers, especially the robots, have this tendency to throw the ball inside over and over and over again, meaning you can pick up lots of money and runs since getting a hit by pitch gives you $1000 and takes away $1000 from the other team.

But worst of all, the AI’s hitting is just dreadful. I’m about 11 games into a season I started and I haven’t allowed a run yet, and maybe 5 or 6 hits total over the course of the season. One of the two pitchers that I use has one of the worse Runs Allowed statistics, so I’m sure you can duplicate this trick with anyone.

1) Have your pitcher be right-handed.
2) Don’t be tired.
3) Move to the far left-hand side of the mound. (From the game’s vantage point.)
4) Throw a pitch that starts on the left hand side of the plate as a ball, then curves in for a strike. Repeat this for the second pitch. The batter will almost never swing at this (the odds might be one in 10,000)
5) Start the third pitch from the same area, curving in toward the batter if they are left-handed or away if they are right-handed. You want this pitch to wind up about half-way into the right batter’s box.
6) The hitter will either strike out pitifully or pop up the ball no deeper than halfway to the outfield.

The only way this ever fails is if you hit the batter. You don’t need to worry about making the ball go fast, or even being particularly good with your aim. The very best left-handed hitters (.380 or higher) will be able to consistently pop that ball up. Everyone else will probably strike out. Want some proof? I wasn’t even trying in this game (check out much money I pooled and didn’t use) and this happened:

Yep, 27 strikeout perfect game. I repeat: I wasn’t even trying. So yes, this game is way too easy once you figure it out. Which is a shame, because if it were a little more challenging, it might be one of the best games on the system. Instead, it’s just aesthetically gorgeous.

Ah well, thats more than most games have. Bravo, SNK.

At the time, only a few teams were rumored to be picking him up: the Mets, the Yankees, and the Orioles. None of them did. Baseball was in one of it’s mini-eras of fiscal conservation, which obviously was not collusion. Coming off four seasons of crushing the ball (.973 OPS or higher in all four seasons) while missing only 62 games and having one of the best arms in baseball, Vladimir Guerrero was only able to sign a five-year, $70 million dollar deal. That’s a much more impressive track record than Matt Holliday has coming into this offseason, and he is probably going to top $100 million in his next contract. Why am I not doing a “What if the Mets had signed Vladimir Guerrero?” scenario? It’s hard to be sure that he would have joined the Mets considering the relative failure they had experienced compared to the Angels in the recent past. Guerrero’s desire to stay away from the media frenzy also throws into question whether he’d sign in New York. It’s not as plausible of a scenario when you have to guess at someone’s free will, in my eyes.

The Mets were coming off one of the worst years in franchise history, a dismal 95 loss season in which they’d sold off the majority of their assets at the trade deadline. At the end of the year they were filling the lineup with replaceable players that would never see major league time again in their careers. Names like Danny Garcia, Prentice Redman, and Jeff Duncan littered the roster. Prized 2002 free-agent acquisition Tom Glavine had posted a 4.53 ERA, Al Leiter had started to get extremely walk-prone, and the rest of the rotation was filled with #3/#4 starters. It was a terrible time to be a Mets fan, with only the emergence of Jose Reyes in the middle of the season providing much hope for the future.

The Jim Duquette administration came into the offseason with no pressure and many big contracts off the books. Other than Mike Piazza, Glavine, and Leiter, the highest paid Met was Cliff Floyd at $6.5 million. Duquette was given the checkbook but the dollar amounts had been written for him. The Mets were only able to offer Guerrero a 3 year/$40 million deal near the end of the offseason, so they clearly had a budget. Duquette mixed value signings and terrible overpays. He managed to ink Mike Cameron to a bargain 4 year/$26 million contract, and while Braden Looper melted down in 2005 and earned the scorn of Mets fans, it’s easy to forget that he was paid only $2.8 million over 2 seasons with the Mets and was an adequate bullpen option. The Mets also gave 3 years and $20 million to Kaz Matsui, moving their most promising prospect at the time to second base to do it.

Despite the limited budget, the Mets had enough money to take on Ramirez’s contract. Counting the supposed Guerrero contract, the Mets were willing to commit roughly $20 million to payroll in the 2003 offseason. It would’ve exhausted their resources, but it could’ve been done. Why didn’t they do it? Asides from the Mets management not showing up at any Mensa meetings in the 2000′s, there were three real arguments against it:

1) Cliff Floyd was a very good left fielder coming off a great year, and he was signed to a contract that was a bargain.
2) Manny Ramirez was widely considered to be a terrible defensive player, and Shea Stadium is enormous.
3) Manny Ramirez is bad for the clubhouse according to Boston tabloids, who have a sterling track record on this sort of thing.

Let me poke my holes in these conclusions. I’m reminded of a Bill James quote, “Bad organizations will tend to project their weaknesses on their good players, and ultimately will dwell not on what the player can do, but on what he can’t.” I am a fan of the attempts to quantify defense, particularly UZR. Ramirez was believed to be a poor defender even before reputable statistics were created, and when UZR originally targeted him as someone costing the Red Sox an enormous amount of runs, it seemed to fit. However, his UZR dramatically improved after he escaped Boston, and with the same shift around Jason Bay’s numbers next to the Green Monster, I am suspicious of the results.

He would probably have had to play right field for the Mets, as Cliff Floyd had a mental block about playing first base after getting injured there earlier in his career. So what? The Mets spent nearly 700 plate appearances in 2004 between Todd Zeile and Jason Phillips. Phillips was coming off a superb year, but he never should have been expected to hit like he had in 2003 again. This coming from someone who owns a Jason Phillips jersey. They also spent most of 2004 explaining that Mike Piazza couldn’t catch and trying to force him to play first base. Instead of focusing all this effort on what Piazza couldn’t do (throw out base runners), they would’ve been much better off taking James’ advice: finding a catcher with a gun who would spell him against great basestealing teams, preferably who was left-handed and could hit a little, and just let it all hang out. Mike Piazza was still a valuable player behind the plate because of his bat.

The 2004 Mets were pretty clearly not going to be a winning team given the budget, so the focus should’ve been on finding star caliber players. The Mets had three young players in the periphery with this sort of talent at this point: Jose Reyes, David Wright, and Scott Kazmir. Lastings Milledge had this talent as well but had just recently been drafted and was far from a sure thing with no real minor league experience. Manny Ramirez, at this point, was an mpact bat who was still in his prime. Someone who churned out great offensive seasons with assembly-line style regularity. Someone who could be another building block for the next good Mets team.

Instead of going for the star, the Mets got the underrated Cameron and Matsui. I thought both of those were pretty decent moves at the time, and while Cameron is never going to be an offensive force, you can win a championship with him being a supporting member. Matsui was more of a scouting gamble, but after Ichiro came over and lost most of his power, it should have tripped a few alarms about Japanese players. The projections systems thought he would be Barry Larkin-lite, but in retrospect, he probably should’ve been rated around the lines of a Yunel Escobar today. He wouldn’t even hit that projection, of course, but it would’ve been a little closer to the truth.

I wouldn’t say those were bad signings, but I’d contend that the Mets would have been much better off claiming Ramirez on waivers. Lets create a world where the Mets did absolutely nothing differently than they actually did between then and now except getting Ramirez in 2003 and negating the Matsui and Cameron signings. 2004 happens, the Mets still make an abysmal Scott Kazmir trade short-sightedly and anguish is felt. Duncan is given center field and Garcia is given second base. They both prove they are awful, and the Mets struggle out to about the same record as they had. Maybe a few extra wins given Ramirez’s superb hitting. Say they get up to 75-77 wins.

Next offseason, Omar Minaya is hired. The Mets smartly go out and nab Carlos Beltran and Pedro Martinez and we play the whole season over again, except for, of course, Ramirez. Let me add and subtract some WAR:

2005 WAR:
Cameron: 2.0
Matsui: 0.1
Doug Mientkiewicz: 0.6

These are the guys that were actually a part of the Mets going 83-79, with a 89-73 Pythagorean record that would put them right next to the Astros. My projection here involves Victor Diaz at first base.

In their place, lets assume simply replacement level production and Ramirez.

Manny Ramirez: 4.3.

Would this boost be enough to make up the 6 games the Mets needed to make the playoffs? Maybe it would’ve, maybe not. Either way, it certainly would’ve made things more interesting. Perhaps Carlos Beltran doesn’t struggle as much with the great expectations with Manny behind him? The Mets weren’t too far off being a playoff team in 2005, and it’s not inconceivable that they could’ve been with Ramirez.

2006 comes, the Mets ship Victor Diaz off for some reason (has anyone ever figured out what he did to get blackballed after that 05 season?) and wind up with Carlos Delgado. They do not acquire Xavier Nady or Shawn Green, because they don’t have Mike Cameron to start the trade process. There wasn’t really much effect either way in 2006; the Mets had such a great confluence of luck and talent that they were probably going to the playoffs anyway.

2007. Cliff Floyd walks, Moises Alou is in. Here is your relevant comparison:

Shawn Green WAR, 2007: 0.4
Manny Ramirez WAR, 2007: 0.9

Closer than you’d think, right? But there’s also the fact of Manny being a true talent -15 or so corner outfielder. In 2007, his Fenway-driven UZR was -28. Either way, I don’t think there is much of a doubt that having Ramirez over Green would’ve delivered the Mets, no matter how heartless they were, into the postseason in 2007. Where they could have joined such teams as the 2000 Yankees and 2006 Cardinals in having a chance to fluke into a World Series in a year where they weren’t as good as they previously were.

The 2008 version comes down to this equation:

Ryan Church WAR, 2008: 1.6
Manny Ramirez WAR, 2008: 6.8

Yes, I think that might’ve been enough to make up one game. As a bonus, the Mets would have either gotten to keep Milledge or watch the fallout from the bizarre Milledge for Brian Schneider trade quickly ruin Minaya’s reputation. At least until the playoff games happened again and he was praised for no reason, like Ed Wade was. In 2009, Manny’s 50 game suspension would’ve just been another data point that the Mets had pissed off the baseball gods and were being punished, so he’d have fit right in.

Are there major caveats to this sort of analysis? Absolutely. There is no guarantee that Ramirez would’ve taken to right field again at a -15 UZR rate. Maybe he would’ve been -20 or so. Of course, Ramirez might have hit even better than he actually did in 2004-07 teeing off on National League pitchers instead of playing in the AL East.

There are tens and twenties of avoidable or executable moves that could have gotten the Mets to the playoffs in 2007 and 2008. They only missed by a game each year. I guess what I find so appealing about this scenario is that the Mets could have gotten it all for nothing. There is usually some form of free will involved in these scenarios to hedge bets on, such as framing one around Guerrero signing with the Mets. The Mets could also have just traded for Manny in 2007 or 2008, but that would’ve involved a price. For one moment, one of the best players in baseball was available for absolutely nothing. No catch. If the Mets had the initiative to be bold, it could have meant three more seasons of playoff baseball for the cost of nothing and a completely different atmosphere around a jaded and cynical fan base.

When you have a chance to acquire a great player at a bargain, you can figure out the details later. This was the mindset that the Mets should always have given their market position. If they had, the Mets could’ve been looking at four straight years in the playoffs and a brand on an equal footing to the Yankees. That’s worth a whole lot more than $100 million over 5 years.

Managing: The Great Subjective Oasis

“Okay, lets walk this next batter, set up the double play.”
“Oh Hank, I can strike out this lapdancer in my sleep.”
“No, it’s not good strategy! Walk this gal and pitch to the one with the ridiculous implants up next!”

– King Of The Hill, “Take Me Out Of The Ballgame”

Sabermetrics has penetrated almost every front office to this point, whether it is used extensively like in Boston or given lip-service as it is in Kansas City. The majority of the analytical war is over, and natural evolution will follow in front offices across America as Willy Taveras and his ilk are slowly marginalized. The internet has provided better access to educational material for fans, and they’re in the weaning process to slowly get off the influence of old school baseball clichés.

However, there remains one area of organized baseball that still seems to be a safe haven from statistical analysis: managing. Whether it’s a baseball site, football site, basketball site, team-specific or general, one of the staples of the fan experience is that we all get together and talk about how stupid our manager is. You can get it from a Nationals blog or a Red Sox blog, you can read about it in a Pirates game in mid-April or the World Series.

Despite the fact that we all love to critique it, very little statistical research has actually been employed to determine the skills of a manager. Baseball Prospectus 2008 sums it up bleakly with “There are many aspects of a manager’s job that defy enumeration, and as a result, few bother to try. For the most part, only two statistics are ever brought to bear in evaluating manager’s performance: wins and losses.” Indeed, the fancy new redesign at baseball-reference has brought us so many batting and pitching statistics that our heads spin, but the managing statistics remain pretty simple: wins, losses, finish.

In 2006, The Book was published by Tom Tango, Mitchell Lichtman, and Andrew Dolphin. A revolutionary tome, it set out to detail in great analysis what optimal strategies would be if playing by the theoretical “book”, which unsurprisingly differed greatly from what the actual conventional wisdom of the time has gone with. While trying to do some research to soothe my head about Jerry Manuel’s early season proclivity to bring in five relievers a game, I reread parts of The Book and it made me wonder how hard it would be to concoct even a rudimentary rating system to look at.

The amount of subjectivity one would have to remove to get real results out of the project is staggering. I would think most fans expect the end rankings to purport that most every manager in baseball was doing his team a disservice, making it a situation where the “least bad” was really the best. There would also be several suggestions in The Book that simply would be unfeasible to lay solely at the hands of the manager. The “three starters, two swingmen” philosophy is something that would probably require more of an organization-wide commitment than simply a managerial decision, for example. Free agent starters would probably be unwilling to sign if they wound up having their innings cut.

But is it possible?

So What Could Be Used To Rank Managers?

Perhaps the simplest matter is their lineup. Hitters are the more predictable creature, and given the amount of research that The Book provides on the subject, it would seem pretty easy to judge a manager on his lineup choices. Kudos can be given for batting the best hitters where they should hit, or for running a successful platoon. However, you wind up with questions such as “what about players with no major league track record?” or “what happens with a player who has been in a three-month slump that may wind up being more?” that make even this task seem a little harder than you’d normally think.

Starting pitching gets a little more complicated. Is the manager skipping his fifth starter as often as possible? If he’s not, does he start after June when he’s got a better handle on how his team is playing? The larger problem is that every pitcher has different stuff and tendencies. Does this guy have the stamina to even get me to 90 pitches? Or is his stuff so unaffected that he could go 130? If this guy lets runners on, is his stretch pitching so bad that I need to go get him in any situation? The lineup you could judge on a team level fairly quickly, but for the rotation you need to look at each pitcher as an individual.

With substitutions, you run into an even greater array of subjective problems. Perhaps the manager hasn’t used the best pinch-hitter on his bench? Or perhaps the manager used the third-best, but justified it because his hitter hits fastballs and the pitcher throws mainly fastballs? Is he making his relief corps make short appearances when they could handle long ones? Is he properly leveraging situational pitchers, or is he leveraging them to the point where it costs his team because they can’t throw to enough batters? Is he consciously using his best reliever in the highest leverage situations?

Strategically, there are even more decisions. You can’t just have a blanket no-bunt rule, but the idea of a manager bunting too much or not enough is also, to a point, team dependent. Is he bunting in good situations for his team? Does he sometimes let his average or good-hitting pitchers swing away in bunt situations? Is he shifting against everyone he should be shifting against? Does he abuse the intentional walk or pitchout?

As you can see, such a project would be a challenge. Not only would it encapsulate every little piece of objective data that the statistical community has been building for years, but it would also have cutoff points and limitations that would limit its effectiveness as an analytical tool unless we had the same knowledge each manager has.

The Future

This wall shall also crumble one day. While all we really have these days to hold onto besides The Book are vague hintings of Billy Beane running the show from his office or Manny Acta reading Prospectus, managing will probably be the next forefront of sabermetric focus. I would bet quite a bit of money that we’ll see some sort of basic managerial analytical tools pop up sometime in the next five years.

But will it reach the owners? This is a much touchier subject than player acquisition. With that, you could point to a much greater cost savings and there was a clear divide between the business side of baseball and the actual baseball lifers. This doesn’t save the same amount of money, guarantee any improvement to the club, and is quite a bit riskier in terms of human interaction. Bring in a statistical guy who can’t run a fielding drill or demand the respect of the players, and the clubhouse could divide. Bring in someone as a surrogate tactical manager and you risk alienating the actual manager, perhaps at least to the point where he ignores the tactical suggestions.

Pardon the tacky fantasy/politics association, but this situation calls for a uniter. Perhaps there is a youth or player among us who can read the stats and also carry himself as a baseball lifer. That will be the next barrier. It may take some time, as it usually does in life, but logic and education find a way to beat tradition eventually. When that day comes, we’ll probably all still think we know better. But at least we’d have reason to pause and think about it.

Since I’ve been playing this game for a few days now rather than finishing up the NL predictions post, I thought I’d just go ahead and write about it instead. Can we call it even? Well, probably not. But whatever. I’ve been doing some work with my video game collection, mostly my ROM’s, and this game has caught my eye. The batter interface is actually really intuitive, the graphics are excellent for a Game Boy Advance game, and it actually plays really well.

As with most baseball video games, it has a major flaw: the superstars are simply overpowered. This was also seen in the much more acclaimed MVP Baseball series, although it doesn’t have an accompanying bug about left-handers being unable to hit home runs. I’ve ran about 27 games with the 2001 Texas Rangers, ARod is hitting .530 or so with 40 homers, Pudge is hitting .500 with 25, Palmeiro and Frank Catalanatto also are putting up insane numbers.

However, despite this flaw and the fact that there are only four ballparks, no trading, and no minor leaguers, this game gets acclaim from me for being able to do what seems to be IMPOSSIBLE for most developers to get right. YOU CAN ACTUALLY DRAW A WALK IN THIS GAME. Yes, thats right, the CPU will actually throw more than three balls in an at-bat, and the statistics that come of it actually make the game realistic when you aren’t playing with overpowered players. The game gives everyone letter grades, and essentially if you have a big hitting circle (an A, B, or C with big power), you are unstoppable. Otherwise, the statistics turn out really well. Rusty Greer is at about .290/.370, rookie Michael Young is at .250/.330, it’s an astonishingly good system for a portable baseball game.

The batting interface triggers with timing, you have to start charging your swing at a different time depending on the velocity of the pitcher. They can catch you thinking fastball and get you to mistime your swing and hit a weak popup. You can go from facing a soft tossing lefty to a righty with a 97 mph fastball and have to change timing completely, which can throw you off for a few at-bats. Most importantly, theres no amount of directional aim involved for finding the pitches, which is always murder on a 4 button control pad. You position your hitting circle before the pitch, and if the pitch is going to land in it, it automatically focuses you on the ball. From there, you just have to guess speed.

It’s not a video game without warts. There are very few baseball games that actually deliver a solid experience, but this one is really really good at the few things it gets right, and those are a few things that happen to be really rare in the grand scheme of baseball video games. A nice change of pace, well-deserving of the 8.0 it got on MetaCritic. Do check this game out if you are a sports fan with a few hours to kill. Just don’t be surprised it it turns into more than that.

Here’s the thing with predictions, whether it’s the NCAA tourney or the start of one of the many wonderful sports seasons: it always seems a little bit forced. We’ve advanced with our statistical projections far enough that at this point we have a pretty good idea of the teams that should win. You have your odd three or four team race, sure. In baseball this year, both Eastern divisions have a pretty good share of plausible winners. The NL Central and the AL West, however, are almost universally handed to the Angels and Cubs. In ESPN.com’s preseason predictions 17 of 21 experts gave the AL West to the Angels, and 16 of 21 gave the NL Central to the Cubs. The main challengers to the Cubs and Angels are a little flawed, sure, but I have no problems envisioning a different winner in either of them. At some point, I think the rate of predictions towards the “favorites” is a little flawed.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the postseason predictions, where 15 of the 21 ESPN World Series winners came out of the AL East. The standing hypothesis is that the AL East was the strongest division in baseball last year, and this offseason the Yankees injected themselves with a ton of free agent talent. Well sure, that’s plausible. How many of the last ten World Series winners were really the best team in baseball though? The Phillies probably weren’t the “best” team in the National League last year, the 2006 Cardinals were barely over .500, and it’s become increasingly common for a Wild Card team to represent it’s league (or even win) in the World Series. So why pick the favorites to win it all? Shouldn’t it be completely varied? It’s a seven game series, anything can happen and anyone can become a hero.

That said, even though we’re already a few games into the season, let me throw some of my very own predictions onto the wall and see how they stick.

AL East
1) Tampa Bay
2) Boston (WC)
3) New York
4) Toronto
5) Baltimore

Like I said, this should probably be the race to follow in the AL. My gut instinct at around the time Spring Training started was that the Rays and Yankees would make it, with Red Sox nation left weeping. Alex Rodriguez’s injury and steroid use threw that into question for me. Not only is the month or so he’ll be out a big deal, but he’s so self-conscious about himself that I felt like we were in for a down year from him after the steroid allegations came out. I admit that is purely subjective, but to me it seems like there isn’t a star in baseball who feeds on his public perception as much as Rodriguez, and as the boos further cement themselves in to his head, I just think he’ll be bothered initially and slump a bit.

So unfortunately, I had to take the Red Sox to the playoffs with me because I just can’t see another challenger to win 95 games in the AL Central or West. I say unfortunately because it has come to my attention that I actually dislike the Red Sox more than any team in baseball, and it’s actively because of their fan base, which straddles the line between drunken frat boy and smug-guy-who-must-yell-about-his-team-to-make-up-for-the-fact-that-he-has-no-real-life, with a heaping helping of human interest “old man who lived to see them win in 2004″ story thrown in. I realize that any fan base is prone to bandwagoners when they’ve been as successful as the Red Sox have been the last few years, but when you combine the fact that they have the audacity to have a card carrying “nation” and the fact that Boston being the preeminent college town in America means that every year we get a huge new wave of young douchebaggy Red Sox fans, you have a recipe for an annoying fan base that could last for aeons. So yeah, I might be a wee bit biased on this one, and even I can’t see a way for them to miss the playoffs. I don’t think they are as good as the Rays though, as the Rays have a deeper lineup, a better high-water mark as full as overall bullpen performance, and a slew of backup plans that don’t have the same sort of question marks as the Sox carry (see: John Smoltz and Brad Penny).

As far as Baltimore and Toronto, I know that Baltimore is the trendy pick to finish fourth cause they’ve built a nice little young core quietly, but I think if there’s one thing that JP Riccardi has proven he can do, it’s build a middle of the pack ballclub that can play enough good defense to make his pitchers look better than they really are. Maybe 77 wins versus 73 for the Orioles? There’s not a huge difference but I think the Orioles are out of their league as far as mediocrity experience goes. Plus the Jays could always go out and get Mark Loretta at the trade deadline.

AL Central
1) Detroit
2) Chicago
3) Minnesota
4) Cleveland
5) Kansas City

I really liked how the Tigers spent the offseason being aggressive about their lineup. They shipped in Laird from Texas, who should be an upgrade on Pudge. They brought in Adam Everett, who if recovered from injuries, should be at least decent for them factoring in defense. Miguel Cabrera should be better after his monster second half, they got rid of the declining Sheffield. I don’t know what to make of some of the bad years they had on that pitching staff last year, but between Verlander, Bonderman, Porcello, Jackson, and Galaragga theres the makings of a good rotation. They don’t have a great bullpen, but I don’t know if they’ll have to in this division. I think they can take it. I also don’t understand why people don’t agree with the decision to bring Porcello up. Pitchers are on a completely different timetable than hitters are, in my opinion. If my pitcher can go get MLB outs right now, I want him up there before theres a chance I lose some of his innings to injury. Is it fiscally insane to give up a year of a good cost-controlled young pitcher instead of letting him get his feet wet in AA? Maybe so, but in a division this tight, every game counts. Maybe two months of Porcello is the difference between playoffs and not.

Minnesota would be my preseason favorite if I had any idea what to expect with Mauer, but you can play glass half-empty on almost their entire lineup besides Morneau. They don’t have any dominant starters, but they don’t have any bad ones either. I sort of feel like if you replaced Mauer and Morneau with say, Yadier Molina and Lyle Overbay, the Twins would have the most mediocre team in baseball and would be a deadlock to finish 81-81 and in third place. I’m too concerned about Mauer to put them any higher than third right now.

The White Sox, PECOTA’s folly, should get a mini-bounceback from Konerko. If their aging lineup core can hold it together for one more season, they could easily take the division. However, I don’t trust Contreras or Colon. For that matter, I really don’t believe Gavin Floyd is going to put together another good season. I could rationally talk myself into these guys winning the division, but what really bothers me about them is they spent all off-season cutting payroll. If they’re close, are they going to go out and get what they need at the deadline? I dunno. I think they could make it but I don’t like them as much as Detroit.

After about six seasons picking them to win the crown or flounder in last, I’ve learned that no matter what I pick the Indians to do, they do the opposite. Right now, it looks like they have more holes in their rotation than the White Sox, and while I think you can construct a compelling argument where they win the division, it pretty much relies on Cliff Lee repeating his Cy Young form…and even before his first two starts of this season, I would’ve bet against that.

As for the Royals, Dayton Moore has been an unmitigated disaster of a GM. Trading for Mike Jacobs and blocking a wonderful prospect with a wonderful name, signing Kyle Farnsworth to a ridiculous contract, giving up Ramon Ramirez for Coco Crisp, the Jose Guillen signing. The only risk he’s taken thats really worked out is signing Gil Meche, and I’m pretty sure that it failed in just about every alternate universe. I don’t buy the hype on this team.

AL West
1) Los Angeles
2) Texas
3) Oakland
4) Seattle

Before the Angels managed to sign Bobby Abreu for the sickeningly low price of 1 year, $5 million, I was leaning towards giving one of the Rangers or A’s a chance to hang with them. Even still, I think the Angels rotation depth is cause for concern at this point. If I’d made my picks after the season had started, I would be much more inclined to give Texas a second look. The Angels still have a capable lineup though, built around Vladimir Guerrero, Abreu, Mike Napoli, and a bunch of guys who should be average for their positions. They’ve also handily proven the prediction systems wrong for the last few years, so I’m willing to give them a little more leeway.

The Rangers are the same team they’ve been since roughly the time Nolan Ryan retired: great offense, suspect pitching. The A’s would be much easier to build a case for if they’d had ANY KIND of capable starting pitching around. If they were still able to lug Harden out, I think they’d be a dangerous team. The Mariners…umm…well, they will try to uphold the rules of the game and not get too embarrassed.

Awards
MVP: Miguel Cabrera Haha just kidding, Dustin Pedroia wins because he is so so scrappy.
Cy Young: John Danks
Rookie of year: Matt Weiters

Playoffs
Angels over Rays
Red Sox over Tigers
Angels over Red Sox

I think it’s about time the statistical blip of the Red Sox ownership of the Angels in the postseason unravels. Joe Buck’s bored voice will exclaim something along the lines of “The Red Sox…had owned the Angels…almost like the Giants are owning the NFL right now, right Tim?” and the over/under of Nick Adenhart montages by major sports outlets is 8. Monday: The NL.