August 25, 2006
NL Central Roundup
The Mets completed their sweep of the Cardinals yesterday with a 6-2 victory. The St. Louis starting pitching in the series was simply awful. The allowed four home runs and ten walks in 14 innings (that's less than five per start) leading to nineteen runs scored. If they make the playoffs, they're likely to meet a team with a good offense. How is this staff going to hold up against that? They can't pitch Chris Carpenter every day.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, the Eric Milton allowed three runs on two homers, but the revamped Reds bullpen held as five pitchers managed to get seven outs, allowing the offense to score late and take the game 6-3. Edwin Encarnacion continued his great season with three hits and three RBI, and David Ross score and drove in the go-ahead run with an eighth inning solo homer of Chulk.
St. Louis is still in first place by virtue of playing two fewer games, but only .001 separate the two teams in the standings. San Diego and Philadelphia are within striking distance of both teams. Outside of the NL East, it's going to be a fun last month of the season in the NL. Maybe we can finally get a multiple tie scenario; LA, SD, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati all finish with the same record. Then we'd have a one-game playoff for each division, with the losers going into a three way playoff for the wild card!
As a Mets fan, I'm absolutely rooting for a tie.
Let them all burn out their staff in a playoff so our boys can mop them up faster and get on with business.
And by "get on with business" you must mean trying to avoid getting swept in the World Series.
Good luck with that.
Hmm. I wonder how the playoffs would look if we just took the top eight teams overall; if the playoffs were held today, the matchups *would* be CHI@NYY, OAK@DET, LAD@STL, CIN@NYM, but if the league was re-seeded (imperfectly, I know), you'd replace STL, CIN, LAD with MIN, BOS, TOR. I'm not saying Boston's played themselves into deserving a spot in the playoffs (or that Toronto has), but they *do* have better records than all but one NL team. That's a little weird.
Two other questions: how have DET/CHI/MIN not beaten each other up more? Also, in the old (two-division) system, we'd have CHI@DET and CIN@NYM; would that be the widest spread from top-playoff-team to bottom-playoff-team (1/2/4/11), and would George Steinbrenner try to have the Yankees (ten games up on Cincy, but out of the playoffs) added to the NL West?
To one of your questions: "how have DET/CHI/MIN not beaten each other up more? "
They very nearly have beaten each other up:
DET vs. CHI/MIN -- 15W 16L
MIN vs. CHI/DET -- 12W 16L
CHI vs. DET/MIN -- 17W 12L
Specifically, CHI has beaten up DET (11W 5L), DET has beaten up MIN (10W 5L), and MIN has played to a near draw with CHI (7W 6L).
If MIN had 2 more Ws vs CHI instead of Ls (9W 4L), each team would be at or within 1 game of .500 vs the other 2 combined. And MIN would be 1.5 games up in the wild card instead of 0.5 games behind.
I'd say they pretty much *have* beaten each other up.