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July 05, 2005
Some observations at baseball’s halfway point
The All-Star break is next week, but the half-way mark of the baseball season—at least for the Cardinals—was yesterday. With last night’s 9-3 win over the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Cards advanced their record to 52-30, putting them 11.5 games in front of the second-place Cubs and on pace to win 102 games this season. Which is awesome, of course.
Some observations:
- The Washington Nationals have scored and allowed an equal number of runs (340). They’re a great story and all, but they have no business being 19 games over .500. However, as Rob Neyer points out, even if they go .500 the rest of the season (as their RS/RA ratio would suggest) they’ll still finish with 90 wins, which might be enough for a playoff berth.
- At the start of last night’s games, every team in the NL East was at .500 or over, while every team in the other two NL divisions (except the division leaders themselves) were below .500. I’d have thought that the unbalanced schedule would prevent this kind of thing from happening, but I guess the NL Central and West are pretty weak divisions.
- Derrek Lee is having a monster season, no doubt, but let’s not get carried away with talk of a Triple Crown. He leads the NL in only one of the three catagories (Batting Average), and while he’s 2nd in HR and 3rd in RBI, he’s also on pace to completely shatter his career bests. It’s likely he will, in fact, set new career highs, but at this rate he’ll come close to improving his career best BA by 100 points, his career best HR total by 20, and his career best RBI total by 40—this all seems like a stretch.
- Meanwhile, in other Triple Crown news, Albert Pujols is 2nd in the NL in BA, 2nd in RBI, and 3rd in HR. Also, he’s first in Runs. And his season projections are pretty much in line with his career norms. He’s clearly the best hitter in baseball, and everyone knows it. His team went to the World Series last year and leads its division this year by 12.5 games by the All-Star break. I swear, if he gets snubbed for the MVP again…
I don’t know why it took me so long to start commenting on baseball, but I’m going to keep it up. It’s just too fun. :) And maybe I’ll even consider stooping low enough to comment on the American League…
Posted by alex at July 5, 2005 12:47 PM
Comments
you are such a baseball dork :-)
Posted by: mammalman ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.boycats.org/nav-commenters.gif)
at July 14, 2005 09:28 AM
This is hard to deny. I do love it so.
Actually, bad luck and timing have prevented me from seeing as many games this year as I’d like. It’s pretty unfortunate. I’m hoping to catch a whole bunch of Cardinals games in this, the last year of Busch Stadium, when I get back into town.
Posted by: alex at July 16, 2005 08:46 AM