OK, so they haven’t exactly set the Central alight, but the Astros are creeping back into things. There’s one game left in Cincy as I type – a favorable pitching match-up for the Juicers – and Astros sit 6.5 games out of 2nd place with a chance to shrink that down to 5.5 tonight. With Roy on the mound and Berkman swinging for the fences, you have to fancy the Astros’ chances tonight. And did you know that Blud ‘n’ Mudders are 5-0 in their last five 1-run games?
However, after that it’s off to Pittsburgh, where things might get a little rougher. You see, the Astros have a sparkling rotation set for the wrap-around in PNC: Redding; Munro; Cruz and Miller. Yikes! Mlicki is due back at some point, but Hernandez may need surgery (MRI today or tomorrow) and Shane is definitely done for the year. The Astros are probably going to have a hole in their rotation for the rest of the season. Now that they’ve abandoned the B-Movie experiment of “The Sarloos Project” and beamed Kirk back down to the minors, the Astros will need Hernandez back and healthy, or Munro to be what no one’s ever expected him to be. That’s a tall order.
Of course, nothing the Astros have suffered compares to what has befallen the Co-Ards. Their rotation was just coming back together when Darrell Kile died. One cannot ignore the human tragedy here, this was devastating to Kile’s family, friends and fans, but this is a baseball column (sometimes) so what of the impact to the team he left behind? They’ve re-called the ineffective Travis Smith, so now they have two Smiths that get shelled on a regular basis. Woody Williams appears to be in full stride after a short DL stint earlier in the year, so they at least have 3 effective starters, which is 3 more than the Reds. But for now they seem to be lurching along, unable to shake off either this tragedy or the chasing pack.
So there we have it: a classic Central division race. One over achiever sammiched between two stumbling powerhouses. Oh yeah, and let’s not forget the fancied Cubs about to drop below the horizon. The Astros may be able to make a go of this, but there’s still plenty of time for things to go horribly wrong between now and the All-Star Break.
Meanwhile, in Bud Selig’s Debacle-Land, the Expos are making a run for it. In a move that adds more fuel to the argument that MLB as it stands has no chance to survive, the Expos deal half their minor league talent to the Indians for a pitcher. Why not? They don’t have a future about which to worry, so they can make deals like this all summer long. All they needed was a chicken-shit organization like Cleveland’s who was willing to give up on the year despite being no further out of first place than those self-same Frenchies. This stinks!
But if you want to talk about a “Comedy Central” division this year, despite all the NL’s efforts, the AL has to take the prize. It’s headed by future contractionees the Twins, and no one else is over .500. Detroit are the worst team in baseball, even worse than Tampa Bay and Milwaukee. Cleveland is dumping salary faster than WorldCom and KC is just KC. As bad as the NL Central has been, this division will be a laffer all they way to the strike.
Anyone think there won’t be a strike? Remember the last one? It was all about spiraling salaries. Remember before the last one? Teams like the Twins and Blue Jays could win the World Series. Since then, it’s been nuthin’ but Yankees, save one brief anomaly last year which was a bloop hit off the league’s most dominant closer away from being another NYY title. Oh, and this year they’ve added Giambi and now Mondesi, and their payroll is more than double that of all but 3 or 4 other clubs.
It’s only got worse since the last strike. We’ve seen The Witch get a monster deal from the Dodgers, only to be bested by Hampton with the Rockies, and the first quarter BILLION dollar player in A-Rod! All of which have blown up in the faces of those involved. Sanity does not have a place in MLB.
Major League Baseball is a joke. Players are on the juice, which is illegal, but they’re all willing to step up and be the first to pee in a cup – if only that pesky players association, which they run, would let them do it! Dammit! Meantime, the fat cat owners are pleading poverty while the follically challenged head on that pimple lies to Congress. “We’re broke!” they cry, while dishing out 9 figure deals like Monopoly money and blaming the agent who bid them up against themselves for the last week.
MLB is a steaming pile of cow dung. You and I suffer because we love watching the game that has somehow fallen into the clutches of this den of thieves. $6 beers? Tree-fiddy for water? $80 for a golf shirt? We’re all being gouged my friends, and if a strike is required to fix it, then so be it. Things will be better in the long run.
Oh, and don’t mean a pseudo strike. Not like the last one where the players and owners dosey-do’d for about a year then decided to give it up because they were missing out on all our hard earned cash. I mean a real strike, where this thing blows itself apart and has to be rebuilt on solid ground. Like the 2001 Astros pitching staff.
Lastly, I’d like to wish everyone a happy July 4. I know you might think that I’d be bitter about this day, but I’m not. It happened a long time ago, and I’m always one to let by-gones be by-gones. Besides, if you want to recognize the debt owed to the French on this Yankee holiday, then who am I to complain?