June 29, 2006
Interleague Followup
The Cardinals allowed the Indians to come back last night as the Tribe scored three in the eighth to take a 4-3 lead. But two errors in the bottom of the ninth led to Bob Wickman allowing two unearned runs, and the Cardinals take the game 5-4. That makes the AL record in interleague one-run games 30-15. The American League ended up winning 10 of fifteen interleague games played yesterday.
The West coast games fared better for the NL for the second night in a row. The Rockies received good pitching up and down the staff last night, while Shields shielded nothing for the Angels as the Rockies took the game 6-2. The Rockies bullpen ERA is now 3.95.
Former Mike Mets Cameron and Piazza each homered for the Padres last night, and Greene drove in three as the Padres blew out the Athletics 8-1. With Texas falling to San Francisco 5-1 on a grand slam by Ray Durham, the Mariners crept to within two games of first place as they continued Arizona's misery with a 10-3 thrashing of Arizona. Adrian Beltre picked up a double and a triple, and his slugging percentage is starting to approach .400. For the month of June, Beltre has 17 extra-base hits and scored 26 runs in 24 games.
Update: One thing I didn't mention in the post last night (but I did on the radio program) was the expected level of competition in each league. Basically, for most of this decade, if you want to win in the AL you have to be better than New York and Boston. Those two teams don't let up. On top of that, you have Oakland and Minnesota winning from the low end, so teams in the AL are forced to try to put together great teams just to compete.
In the NL, the Cardinals are always good, but they never try to put together a thirteen star team. Same for the Braves. Despite St. Louis running away with the division the last two years, I don't think that was ever a foregone conclusion. So there's never the push to become a great team, because there are no great teams in the league.
To their credit, the Mets did take this route in 2006. But no one else in the NL seems to be doing it. Why, for example, would an NL West team try to get 10 or 15 games better when it only takes a couple of more win to finish first in the division?
Posted by David Pinto at
08:17 AM
|
Games
|
TrackBack (0)
Dave, I have trouble believing that NL teams haven't tried to build the best teams they possibly could. Yes, with some eye on the money involved, but I'm sure any of the NL West teams would love to run away with the division. And didn't the Mets always seem like they were trying to build a great team instead of building a good team and improving from there?
The big difference that I see between the leagues is that the NL has a much flatter spread of payrolls. In the AL, the Yankees and the Red Sox usually had much higher payrolls than the rest of the league. If anything, I think you'd expect that hold down competition in the AL because the wild card spot was a more unlikely possibility for the rest of the AL. I'd say that these different dynamics created the lack of great teams that you're talking about.
yeah, i noticed that about "great" teams too
i think the cards had a great team in 04 - they just give it up in the WS like oakland did back in 88 and 90. so you don't really need a "great" team to win the WS
but it seem to me that the NL is unusually lousy this year - even if you ignore the AL
I hope the Cards' fortunes have reversed with that lucky win over Cleveland last night. But I'm not optimistic.
AC