The Seattle Mariners are the fly in the ointment for a lot of American League teams right now. At 37-22 and with a one-game lead in the AL West, they’ve prevented Houston from turning the next four months into one long coronation run. By joining the Astros, Yankees and Red Sox atop the American League, […]
The American League wild-card race has five teams vying for the final spot in the playoffs. Assuming that the runner-up in the Oakland A’s/LA Angels race for the AL West title will be in the wild-card game, that leaves five more teams within five games of each other for the last spot. Those teams are, in order of the current standings, the Seattle Mariners, Detroit Tigers, New York Yankees, Toronto Blue Jays and Cleveland Indians. Here’s nine thoughts on that race as it heads into the homestretch…
The Seattle Mariners are way back in the American League West, 10 ½ games behind the Texas Rangers coming into Wednesday’s games. The Mariners aren’t much closer in the wild-card picture, where they’re nine off the pace. But the season isn’t quite to the halfway point and we always see a team or two we don’t expect make a surge. Could Seattle be that team?
The Arizona Diamondbacks lived through a disappointing 2012 season, after winning the NL West the year before. The D-Backs struggled with injuries early, often teased throughout the summer, but never quite put together a sustained run at either San Francisco or Los Angeles. It’s the defending champion Giants and the free-spending Dodgers sucking up all the media air in the NL West in the spring of 2013. TheSportsNotebook’s MLB coverage today will see if Arizona should be considered in the group of contenders, and we’ll also check on two more potential darkhorses out west, the San Diego Padres and Seattle Mariners.