Mets home free in NL East, other races remain
Posted: Thursday, September 06, 2007 3:57 PM
Remember my recent blog about the lineups of the Mets and Braves? Well, to pick up on that, how about what happened last weekend. The Mets, coming off a four-game sweep at the hands of the Phillies in Philadelphia, went to Atlanta -- a house of horrors for them in the past -- and swept the Braves. Atlanta didn’t have an extra-base hit until the final inning of the three-game series.
Compare raw numbers all you want. It isn’t just how often a team hits, but when it hits. And the Mets still have the lineup that NL pitchers would least like to face in crunch time.
The Braves offered Tom Glavine a video tribute honoring his 300th win achieved earlier this season. Glavine warmly accepted. Whether or not Glavine ever pitches again for the Braves, a thaw in the relationship fractured in contract negotiations with Atlanta general manager John Schuerholz would be welcome for both parties. Glavine will always be remembered as a Brave.
Despite the pressure applied by the Phillies last week, the Mets are home free in the NL East. Philadelphia's sweep of New York put it just two games out of the division lead, but the Phillies lost four of their next six while the Mets won five of their next six. The tailspin by the boys from the City of Brotherly Love not only undermined their late-push to overtake the Mets, it ended it. Close the book on the Phillies in the NL East, and I figure on the wild card as well.
It appears out West that the Arizona-San Diego combination will make the postseason, one will win the division and the other will grab the wild card. But the Dodgers are still kicking, somewhat surprisingly given their dreadful August, and the lingering calf injury that is keeping Nomar Garciaparra from the field. It is hard to imagine a once-great player missing this much baseball with his team gasping for air.
That leaves the NL Central's three-team scrap to determine the fourth playoff team. The Cardinals may have been the brunt of some punch lines earlier in the season, but amazingly they could wind up punching a ticket into October and getting a chance to win a second straight World Series.
The Red Sox, Indians, and Angels are home free as the division winners in the AL. Three teams -- the Mariners, Tigers, and Yankees -- are itching to secure the wild card, but expect this battle to wage on, perhaps until the final days of the regular season.
New York holds a decided edge despite the concern over its starting pitching. Roger Clemens has a screaming elbow, and Mike Mussina is mired in an awful slump. Yet, the Yankees have been thrashing the ball in the second half of the season, and with Detroit seeming like it can't pull out of its fade, the Yankees should be strong enough offensively to hit their way into the postseason.
Turning from the races to make the playoffs why did anyone from Major League Baseball think it a good idea to invade a team’s dugout for the purpose of invoking “uniform rules?” Who is so image-sensitive that it was considered wise to make an issue of something so insignificant to the paying customer in the midst of the recent Yankees-Red Sox series?
Boston manager Terry Francona, who got a visit in his dugout from someone from MLB so as it could be checked if the skipper was wearing his uniform jersey under his pullover, is a gentleman or else this could have exploded into some serious ugliness.
Can you imagine the same mild-mannered approach that Francona took to the situation being taken by Earl Weaver, Tommy Lasorda or Billy Martin? I thought not.
