The Minnesota Twins took both ends of their Friday double header to distance themselves even further from the last place Chicago White Sox. We are through two thirds of the season and the Twins are proving to be closer to bad than horrible, with a great chance to extend their winning on Saturday afternoon.
Baltimore is working their way up the coast trying to steal some wins against struggling National League teams to stay afloat in the American League Wild Card race. They took two at San Diego and are now hoping the Giants will be equally hospitable.
Detroit is wicked hot right now. Not only have they won 12 games in a row but they just walked into the second place team in their division’s house – Cleveland – to take the last 4. They have now built a 7 game cushion and asserted their dominance over the division.
The Boston Red Sox have been the hottest team in the division of late rebuilding a little cushion between them and Tampa.
It only took Los Angeles 2 pitches to knock Cardinals starter Shelby Miller out of the game last night – courtesy of a Carl Crawford liner to the elbow. After he was ready to go they absolutely drilled Jake Westbrook who was supposed to start today’s game and in hindsight was obviously not ready to go.
Los Angeles continued their winning ways with a ho-hum victory over Chicago Friday night.
The New York Mets jumped all over the Washington Nationals in the day game of their doubleheader with Washington. They won 11-0 as they smacked around Nats starter Jordan Zimmerman, who is having a great season.
Los Angeles jumped on A’s starter Bartolo Colon in the first but could do no damage after that in losing the first game of their set against Oakland last night.
Chicago is definitely playing for next year at this point so it is going to be tough to try and forecast them for the rest of the season.
St. Louis enters this weekend set in Hotlanta having just swept the Philadelphia Phillies. Over the course of the three games they gave up just 5 runs and and are on a 4 game winning streak that has them a couple of game ahead of Pittsburgh, who is showing no signs of disappearing.
Through the first three games the Tampa Rays have gained on the Red Sox even further and now enter Thursday`s series finale with a chance to take first place the American League East.
The Cincinnati Reds are 7-3 in their last 10 games but they have made up zero ground in their division, the very challenging National League Central.
Pittsburgh came out flat out of the All-Star break, continuing their spate of recent average play. Starter Francisco Liriano had his worst outing in a while giving up 5 ER in less than 5 innings.
Oakland continued their trend of mediocre play on the road dropping the first game of their weekend set against Los Angeles.
Depending on how you are looking at it the New York Yankees are either the luckiest or unluckiest team in the American League. Unlucky because they have been beset by injuries big time but lucky because they are 7 games over .500 and still in the hunt, technically.
It has only been a little more than half a season but things have been pretty wild in the National League West so far.
