After a three-game sweep over the previously sizzling Boston Red Sox, the Rangers are now 20-11 and atop the American League West. Today we’ll look at how they’re getting it done and what this means for the 21 weeks of baseball still ahead.
The Colorado Rockies are the first to throw their hat in the ring for the honor of big surprise team for 2013. The Rockies are 13-4 coming into Sunday’s games and lead the National League West by 2 ½ games. TheSportsNotebook’s National League MLB coverage will ask the question of how much of this is real and what’s a reasonable timetable to make Colorado wait before granting them acceptance as a contender.
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.
While every team is different, the nature of every loss and win with its own nuance, we can at least look back on recent years to see how much the first week told us. In today’s MLB coverage, TheSportsNotebook reviews the last five years (2008-12) to help us determine how much weight to assign this week’s results.
The baseball season starts tonight when Texas welcomes Houston to the American League, in an 8 PM ET game on ESPN. TheSportsNotebook’s MLB coverage throughout March has at least touched on every team in baseball, and made a pick on their Over/Under win props in Las Vegas. Now it’s time for the closing arguments, with complete predictions by record and how the playoffs will progress.
Last season it was the Baltimore Orioles and Oakland A’s who came from off the grid, so to speak and shocked the baseball world with a push into the playoffs and each reached the decisive game of the Division Series round before falling. Are there any such candidates for a similar stunning season in 2013?
Well, if we could say with certainty, they wouldn’t be shockers. But we can at least assess the teams at the bottom of the ladder when it comes to the early betting odds in Las Vegas. TheSportsNotebook’s preseason MLB coverage will therefore focus on the four teams with the longest World Series odds. That’s Miami and Colorado in the National League, along with Minnesota and league-jumping Houston in the American League