The Boston Red Sox stayed atop the American League East this weekend, taking two of three from the New York Yankees. The Sox are 60-40, still the best record in the American League. But in the midst of last night’s 8-7 win in extra innings, the questions about Boston’s starting pitching continue to linger. Does this team really have the arms to survive the next two months
We’re in the final week of play before the All-Star break in major league baseball, and TheSportsNotebook’s MLB coverage will be focused on an effort to capture each division race in a statistical snapshot. Today we begin with the AL East.
After three weeks of play, both the Toronto Blue Jays and the Tampa Bay Rays are, at the very least, having to play with some urgency. While the Red Sox, Yankees and Orioles are all off to good starts, the Jays & Rays are struggling. In today’s American League MLB coverage, TheSportsNotebook will examine why.
The AL East race is still running close to a dead heat, with the New York Yankees holding a half-game lead on the Baltimore Orioles entering Wednesday night’s games. As part of a look at the landscape in this division race, we’re also going to include the Los Angeles Angels. Because it looks like the Angels’ place in the MLB playoff picture is trying to chase down the AL East runner-up for the second wild-card.
Everything was all set up for the Los Angeles Angels to make one final push into the playoffs. The talented big-budget team with the enigmatic bullpen was on a roll and a four-game home series with wild-card leading Oakland was just the ticket to get themselves into the lead for one of the two spots in the first-ever American League wild-card game. But the Angels again seem intent on turning Michael Corleone’s quote from Godfather III on its head, in that every time we think they’re in, they pull themselves back out.
The AL East race is back to a dead heat after last night’s dramatic finish in Fenway Park. With Baltimore having beaten Tampa Bay 9-2, attention swung to the Yankees-Red Sox games, and when Boston’s Jacoby Ellsbury broke a 3-3 tie in the ninth with an RBI single, the Yanks were back to even with the Orioles, with the Rays still hanging at two games back
We’ve talked about the Baltimore Orioles more often than most media outlets here at TheSportsNotebook during the season. Not only is that a byproduct of my having lived in Charm City from 2008-11, but the fact that somebody needed to talk about the Orioles and at least examine why they were winning instead of casually assuming the winning would stop. Now the rest of the media is on the bandwagon, and they’ll get a lot of TV coverage for a four-game weekend series with the New York Yankees that started last night in dramatic fashion.
The American League East has essentially hit the re-set button, with all five teams packed within three games of each other heading into Tuesday night’s games. You can make an argument that this favors the underdog teams—Baltimore, and to a lesser extent Toronto, as an underdog always benefits from shortening the game, or in this case the season by a couple months. You can argue that it works to Boston’s favor, who navigated an early season filled with wounds, both medial and self-inflicted. I don’t see how it works in New York’s favor, although they could certainly still win the division. The team I think really has to be pleased right now is the Tampa Bay Rays, who hold the narrow AL East lead and are well-poised to add to that as summer wears on and we start seeing some separation.
The Toronto Blue Jays’ struggles last week can’t be considered unexpected—not when your schedule is six games against Tampa Bay & Texas, two teams you can make a credible argument are the top two in the American League. But each team has its own set of issues—the Rays are missing Evan Longoria and Desmond Jennings from the lineup and the Rangers, as TheSportsNotebook noted in this past Saturday’s AL West report, had hit a bit of a sluggish stage. If you aspire to make the playoffs, like Toronto does, you shouldn’t be overmatched. But the Jays were, especially the pitching.
The Boston Red Sox are gaining steam in the American League East. The bottom dropped out 12 days ago and Josh Beckett was booed off the mound early, amid reports that he’d been golfing after being unable to pitch and then looking equally unable to pitch when he actually did take the mound against Cleveland. But after that game, the Sox won three in a row from the Indians, then took two from Seattle—including a shutout from Beckett. They split two with Tampa and finally won two of three in Philadelphia over the weekend, with the Sunday rubber match featuring Beckett outdueling Cliff Lee. The Sox are still in fifth place in the American League East and they’re still a game under .500. But they’re only one back of the New York Yankees for fourth in the Division Turned Upside Down and they’re doing with some unlikely heroes.
With the first set of interleague games coming up in the baseball schedule this weekend and teams having at least 35 games under their belt, we’re a little more than 20 percent of the way through the schedule, so now is as good a time as any to have an early season evaluation session. TheSportsNotebook takes a concise look at what each team has done and what we might expect going forward.
Now that Mariano Rivera is gone for the year what does this mean for the New York Yankees? With Rivera sidelined and the Boston Red Sox a self-imploding disaster, has the AL East completely flipped on its head? At the very least, is Tampa Bay now a top-heavy favorite? I’ve always thought the most important thing to focus on after a major injury is to keep the attention on the players who are still there. If you ask, can the Yanks win without Mariano, it implies an answer that goes one way. Asking whether they can win with Jeter, C.C., Cano, Granderson & Co., puts a different spin on it. That’s the spin that matters, so TheSportsNotebook takes a brief look at the post-Rivera Yankees and then the rest of the AL East…