We’re in Philadelphia today for a one-game makeup. I forgot entirely about the game and barely caught our charter flight. I wasn’t alone–there were four of us charging down the concourse, to be faced with all the kids who’d been trying to get autographs from Pedro, and had started to walk back to their buses or scooters or whatever. They recognized us, and started flipping through their card books to match names to unsigned cards. Then you’ve either got to go through the kids, and that’s a disaster either way because Abbie Markham of Action 6 News is live from Logan Airport, where a young kid who just wanted an autograph got a mark of an entirely different kind…
Fortunately, Mirabelli was first and had this scowl on that made him look like he might enjoy eating well-fed children. Dude is huge, and he’s used to having very large people try to knock him down to win games, so some 50-pound kid’s going to bounce off him like a quarter off J.Lo’s ass. The kids parted in front of us and we made our gate. I was a little out of breath carrying my luggage, and told a trainer I might have strained a rib cage muscle. He made a note of it.
Continuing the bill of indictment chronicling the Pirates’ trading habits over the last century. In this fourth and final installment, four more bad trades and 12 good ones.
Roberto Alomar’s done little to help the White Sox, despite Jerry Manuel’s praise for him. The Morgan Ensberg snafu remains the lone glaring blemish on Jimy Williams’ managerial record with the Astros this season. The A’s may not miss Mark Mulder as much as initially feared. Bo Hart has turned into a pumpkin as the Cardinals’ leadoff hitter. ARod’s performance would only win him a much-deserved MVP if he didn’t play for the Rangers. These and other news and notes in today’s expanded version of Prospectus Triple Play.
The A’s have ripped off nine straight wins, taking the lead in the American League West in the process. It’s not the most impressive streak ever–the nine wins have come in equal parts against the Blue Jays, Orioles and Devil Rays–but it has allowed them to regain their balance after losing Mark Mulder for the season to a hip injury. Beating up weaker teams going into September has become something of a rite of passage for the good teams in the AL West. Last year, the Angels took advantage of a similar stretch to leap over the Mariners and become the team to beat in the Wild Card race. They went 10-2 in a two-week run covering late August and early September in which they played only the D-Rays and Orioles. At about the same time, the A’s were winning 20 consecutive games, helped in part by a schedule that had them playing 21 in a row against the shaky AL Central. The practice of the teams in the game’s best division inflating their records against the AL’s weak sisters in August was actually set in 2001. The Mariners went 9-3 against the same bottom-feeders in the AL East in the same part of the season, setting up their September push to 116 wins. The A’s did even better that year, going 11-1 against the Devil Rays and Orioles in the middle of their 58-17 second half. The point is that when judging the performance of teams in the short term, it is essential to look at the schedule. With the unbalanced schedule in the unbalanced American League, teams can go through extended stretches of playing only good or only bad teams. It’s not enough to see that a team has won 15 of 18, or that they went 11-17 in a month. It’s imperative to look beyond that, because the AL schedule largely sets up in four-week stretches of home-and-homes against blocks of opponents, and in the AL, those blocks are often widely disparate, say, two weeks against the Yankees and Red Sox, followed by two weeks against the Tigers and Indians.