This is awesome.

Dave Bowman: You see, something's going to happen.
Heywood Floyd: What? What's going to happen?
Dave Bowman: Something wonderful.

WOW!

So much baseball left to play, but no matter what happens, this Orioles team has been an absolute treat to watch.

The Yankees are just about toast. And this is coming from a huge fan. Granderson has totally fallen apart (barely any days off throughout the season and over thirty) Swisher is vanishing in pressure situations (the sad usual) Teix and A-Rod are question marks from a productivity standpoint. Ibanez and Jones, after playing the field much more than planned, are basically mummies at this point. Sabathia hasn't had his fastball since opening day. Kuroda, great as he has been, is out-pitching his peripherals, and I worry that he will slow down over the last month. I still think they can get it together, a dead cat bounce could lead to a sustained streak of strong play, but the reality is appearing very grim at the moment. This team had the potential to be great, and to see it all evaporate like this is pretty tough. But that's the reality.

Totally awesome.

So far it's been a perfect day of baseball. All the right teams have won, all the right teams have lost. You experience very, very few of these during the regular season.

Orioles, Rays, White Sox, Rangers, and A's in the AL

Nats, Braves, Reds, Pirates, and Giants in the NL

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.
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Profit?

The Tigers apparently should pretend that the ####### Royals and Indians are the White Sox...

#8: Barring a Chisox comeback for the ages, it probably won't matter tonight. Minnesota is up 18-4 in the seventh. That's right, 18-4. Sort of the AL equivalent of when Casey Stengel's Mets went to the North Side, scored 19 runs, and Mets fans who heard the news asked, "Did they win?"

Zombie Steinbrenner is going to dig himself out of the grave and lurch into Yankee Stadium whereupon he's going to eat the brains of every Yankee in a uniform.

So far it's been a perfect day of baseball. All the right teams have won, all the right teams have lost. You experience very, very few of these during the regular season.

It usually only happens when the gods are shining on the Cubs and they are in a season in which they end up getting into the playoffs. The Cubs need a lot of almighty help to get to the playoffs most years and gods are a fickle bunch.

Strong analysis from the Yankee booth, as usual.

Singleton..."I feel a hot streak coming on for the Yankees."

Piniella..."I..uhh...agree with you...uh...Kenny."

Kay...(too busy in-game Tweeting to comment)

If Baltimore wins the AL East, I am thinking that the Mayans are probably right. ;-)

As an aside, how bad do you think Buck Showalter wants this? Beat the Yankees, the Red Sox in disarray...

Props to NTNgod for the daily threads.

Minnesota is up 18-4 in the seventh. That's right, 18-4.

Philip Humber gave up 8 ER in one-third of an inning, which brought his ERA up to 6.50. Without looking anything up, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this is the worst season for a player who pitched a perfect game that year.

The two wild cards suck, but Bud hasn't completely killed the regular season yet.

How people could get so obsessed with the postseason that they lose sight of how great the regular season can be is anyone's guess. Yankees fans: this is exactly what you should want: a pennant race in September.

Would be really fun to see the Yankees bounced from the playoffs - or, worse, dropped into the coin flip game.

If Baltimore wins the AL East, I am thinking that the Mayans are probably right. ;-)

Don't worry. The Cubs still suck.

The Yankees are just about toast. And this is coming from a huge fan. Granderson has totally fallen apart (barely any days off throughout the season and over thirty) Swisher is vanishing in pressure situations (the sad usual) Teix and A-Rod are question marks from a productivity standpoint. Ibanez and Jones, after playing the field much more than planned, are basically mummies at this point. Sabathia hasn't had his fastball since opening day. Kuroda, great as he has been, is out-pitching his peripherals, and I worry that he will slow down over the last month. I still think they can get it together, a dead cat bounce could lead to a sustained streak of strong play, but the reality is appearing very grim at the moment. This team had the potential to be great, and to see it all evaporate like this is pretty tough. But that's the reality.

Hard to argue with any of the above, and it's hard to overcome a deadly combination of age and injuries. What makes it absolutely painful to watch is the unbelievable number of strikeouts in clutch situations. Granderson and Swisher are the worst offenders, but the only regulars or semi-regulars who aren't on a 100K/162G pace are Jeter (90), Cano (96), Chavez (87), and Ibanez (86), none of whom are exactly missing it by that much. Granderson is on a 196K/162 pace, and after tonight Swisher's up to 161.

And to be honest, even given the injuries, this team doesn't have any business being in the postseason. The most absurd statistic of all is that SRS number on BB-Ref, which still has the Yanks at 0.9, Texas at 1.0, the Rays at 0.7, and the Orioles at 0.0---still behind the Red Sox! What a joke. I understand that this number takes in the entire season, but they should really be weighting the run differential to better reflect recent performance.

Brandon Moss just hit a jack off Greinke; 2-1 Angels in the 7th.

Hard to argue with any of the above, and it's hard to overcome a deadly combination of age and injuries. What makes it absolutely painful to watch is the unbelievable number of strikeouts in clutch situations. Granderson and Swisher are the worst offenders, but the only regulars or semi-regulars who aren't on a 100K/162G pace are Jeter (90), Cano (96), Chavez (87), and Ibanez (86), none of whom are exactly missing it by that much. Granderson is on a 196K/162 pace, and after tonight Swisher's up to 161.

If you find strikeouts aesthetically displeasing that's one thing, but strikeouts as opposed to other kinds of outs have virtually nothing to do with run scoring these days.

In any event, your complaint is odd, because the Yankees are under the league average in strikeouts this year. The league strikes out in 19.2% of PA, and the Yankees strike out in 18.9% of PA.

And to be honest, even given the injuries, this team doesn't have any business being in the postseason. The most absurd statistic of all is that SRS number on BB-Ref, which still has the Yanks at 0.9, Texas at 1.0, the Rays at 0.7, and the Orioles at 0.0---still behind the Red Sox! What a joke. I understand that this number takes in the entire season, but they should really be weighting the run differential to better reflect recent performance.


Actually, without the injuries, they're the best team in the American League and it isn't particularly close.

Actually, without the injuries, they're the best team in the American League and it isn't particularly close.

As if it matters if you take a ballclub of older, more brittle players and proclaim, 'You know, if we didn't have any injuries, we'd be the best team in the American League, and it wouldn't be particularly close!'

'But you AAAHHH, Blanche....you AAAHHH in that chair!"

If Baltimore wins the AL East, I am thinking that the Mayans are probably right. ;-)

As an aside, how bad do you think Buck Showalter wants this? Beat the Yankees, the Red Sox in disarray...

I'd have been deliriously happy had the O's gone 82-80 on the year, with the Chris Davis game the one that put us over the top. Buck is amazing.

Don't worry. The Cubs still suck.

The Cubs not winning the WS is how I know I've got at least another year to live. So I'm a bit conflicted about the possibility of the Cubs winning the WS. One the one hand I really really want to see that and on the other hand the Cubs winning ends my immortality.

The networks are going to go ape if the Boston, NY, LA, and Chicago markets don't have a playoff team. The nightmare gets even worse for them if Oak & SF and Bal & DC make it into the playoffs. Both sets play within the same market as the other partner in the set and thus have a lower marginal value than a team from a different market making it into the playoffs. If Boston, NY, LA, and Chicago don't get in and the two sets of teams that I mentioned do get in this might just be the lowest watched baseball playoffs of all time and it might not be even close.

Oak, Det, Balt, & TB with DC, Cincin, SF, Pitt might just cause some deaths at the networks. The addition of either STL or ATL instead of Pitt would probably only cause heart attacks and not actual deaths at the networks but at the moment I can't actually think which of those two teams would be worse for the networks. ATL and TB are pretty close regionally though TB isn't exactly on equal footing with ATL in terms of eyeballs. STL has a pretty strong following and I don't think Cincin gets in the way.

So far it's been a perfect day of baseball.

Not in Toronto. That game can't be described as anything other than a debacle:

Moises Sierra successfully threw behind a runner to start a 9-6 double play, but Yunel Escobar tagged the base instead of the runner, who had properly tagged up before the throw made him run back to second.

There was a long delay as the Oriole's starter needed to clean off his cleats with a tongue depressor because the pitching mound was a muddy mess from all the rain.

This rain somehow was falling on the field despite the Skydome having a retractable roof.

The retractable roof somehow got stuck as it was closing, leaving most of the field and the stands exposed to the heavy downpour.

While the roof was jammed, the fire alarm went off inside the stadium.

Aaron Loup came into the game with two outs and a runner on third. He balked in a run when he started his windup, then inexplicably stopped it without throwing the ball.

Another run scored when Colby Rasmus' throw from the outfield took a wicked hop off the wet turf in front of home plate and bounced past Jeff Mathis.

Chad Beck gave up an infield hit when was unable or unwilling to bend down enough to pick up a ground ball that was in front of the pitcher's mound.

Gregg Zaun accused the team of quitting on the season while doing a postgame show on the team-owned tv station.

And again, there almost was a rain delay / rainout during a game played inside a stadium with a retractable roof.

Just a total debacle. I'm not in favour of contraction or the crazy relegation schemes that you sometimes see here, but if the Jays can't show any effort or ability to play competent baseball against teams in the playoff hunt, and if they can't even manage to have the ####### roof on the stadium in proper working order so it doesn't rain on the field during a ball game, maybe they shouldn't be in the professional baseball business.

Mark Reynolds said, 'I don't know why it was open in the first place - it rained all day."

As if it matters if you take a ballclub of older, more brittle players and proclaim, 'You know, if we didn't have any injuries, we'd be the best team in the American League, and it wouldn't be particularly close!'

To be fair, the most significant injuries of the season were a torn ACL (not age related), a broken bone (not age related), a torn labrum (of one of the youngest pitchers on the team), a broken bone (not age related), etc.

If it was a series of hammy pulls and whatnot, then I'd bite, but this has just been an odd season for freak injuries.

#8: Barring a Chisox comeback for the ages, it probably won't matter tonight. Minnesota is up 18-4 in the seventh. That's right, 18-4. Sort of the AL equivalent of when Casey Stengel's Mets went to the North Side, scored 19 runs, and Mets fans who heard the news asked, "Did they win?"

This was quite an interesting game to attend in person. The Twins just kept hitting line drive after line drive, almost all of which were singles, and sprinkled in a few walks. When Parmelee hit the ball that bounced off the CF wall just out of reach of de Aza's glove and went over for a home run, I couldn't help but burst out in laughter. Fans were already leaving the stadium during the ten-run fifth, but really started pouring out in droves after that homer. The people in charge of the video board tried desperately to keep everyone entertained and smiling by doing the fan-cam thing between literally every half-inning, but it really didn't work. By the seventh or eighth, you could hear a pin drop, although I'm not sure if that's actually more embarrassing than the boos that the fans were raining down on Humber earlier. Unfortunately, I had to leave to pick up a friend from Union Station just as Dewayne Wise came in to pitch the ninth - that's something I had always wanted to see in person.

Also, they showed on the video board that it was Hawk's birthday. When I went back and watched some of the game highlights, it appeared that the color commentator was left alone in the booth to do the play-by-play himself in the latter part of the game. Did Hawk leave to celebrate his birthday and/or drink away his sorrows during the miserable fifth inning?

It's gotta be so tough for these injury-riddled Yankees playing in a division where everyone else was completely healthy all year long.

Mark Reynolds said, 'I don't know why it was open in the first place - it rained all day."

If I recall the in-game tweets from Jays on-hand media, the game was in it's early innings when the Dome began to *open* and within approximately 10 minutes it started to rain. The Dome began closing, and became stuck. The game was 3-0 at that point, during about 2 innings of rain basically over only the pitching mound, the score grew to say 5-0. As the Dome began to finally close and after Villanueva left the game, everything got very ugly. All the TOR media I follow on Twitter sounded like they wanted to puke.

If I recall the in-game tweets from Jays on-hand media, the game was in it's early innings when the Dome began to *open* and within approximately 10 minutes it started to rain. The Dome began closing, and became stuck. The game was 3-0 at that point, during about 2 innings of rain basically over only the pitching mound, the score grew to say 5-0. As the Dome began to finally close and after Villanueva left the game, everything got very ugly. All the TOR media I follow on Twitter sounded like they wanted to puke.

Luckily I opted for the quick re-cap this morning rather than watching the whole archived game. It seems like there's been cautious optimism growing in Toronto the last couple years, it would be a shame to lose all that by punting the last two months of the season.

The Race for 88

BAL 12-15
NYY 12-15
OAK 12-15
TBR 13-13
CWS 15-12
DET 16-11
LAA 16-11

It's gotta be so tough for these injury-riddled Yankees playing in a division where everyone else was completely healthy all year long.

Yeah, you're right. All of those teams have lost players just as good as Mariano Rivera, Alex Rodriguez, Mark Teixeira, C.C. Sabathia, Andy Pettitte, Brett Gardner and Michael Pineda. It's all the same.

Shooty is sad today. Luckily these west coast night games happen when I'm asleep.

If you find strikeouts aesthetically displeasing that's one thing,

AFAIC strikeouts are the equivalent of throwing up on your lap or being taken in by a three card monte hustler. And yes, Ray, I know everything else you're going to say in order to counter this.

but strikeouts as opposed to other kinds of outs have virtually nothing to do with run scoring these days.

Like that.

In any event, your complaint is odd, because the Yankees are under the league average in strikeouts this year. The league strikes out in 19.2% of PA, and the Yankees strike out in 18.9% of PA.

And that.

So what else? Are you going to point out that the Yankees lead the league in home runs? Gee, I didn't know that, either.


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And to be honest, even given the injuries, this team doesn't have any business being in the postseason. The most absurd statistic of all is that SRS number on BB-Ref, which still has the Yanks at 0.9, Texas at 1.0, the Rays at 0.7, and the Orioles at 0.0---still behind the Red Sox! What a joke. I understand that this number takes in the entire season, but they should really be weighting the run differential to better reflect recent performance.

Actually, without the injuries, they're the best team in the American League and it isn't particularly close.

I'm sure that I'll owe cokes to someone above for pointing this out, but the Yankees are scarcely the only team that's had serious injuries. They took their chances by loading up with veteran stars in their declining years on short contracts (Jones, Ibanez, and the odd collection of no-names we've seen lately) as replacements, and this time it didn't work out. Them's the breaks. They haven't quite reached the depths of last year's September Red Sox, but then there's still nearly a month to go.

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It's gotta be so tough for these injury-riddled Yankees playing in a division where everyone else was completely healthy all year long.

Yeah, you're right. All of those teams have lost players just as good as Mariano Rivera, Alex Rodriguez, Mark Teixeira, C.C. Sabathia, Andy Pettitte, Brett Gardner and Michael Pineda. It's all the same.

We all get that point, but of course all of those other teams never had the resources and / or good fortune to sign that many players like that in the first place. No Yankee fan over the age of about six weeks has any real standing to complain about anything other than his own team's questionable decisions and maybe the occasional bad call. Anything else just makes us look like spoiled children who didn't get our yearly replacement BMW and had to settle for a Chevy.

#33, Teixera, ARod, and Sabathia have missed less than half a season, combined. And even so which team hasn't lost a similar amount of talent to the 2012 version of those players?

The Oriolrs have probably had the healthiest club, and theyve lost Nick Markakis, Jason Hammel, Jim Thome, Brian Roberts, Nolan Reimold, Nick Johnson, Wilson Betemit, Troy Patton, Tsuyoshi Wada...

When I saw the Twins were winning 7-3, I figured Hawk was saying "Seven runs isn't going to win this ballgame." Imaginary Hawk would have been right.

Who knows who whines about injuries? Losers, that's who.

Who knows who whines about injuries? Losers, that's who.

And what's with all the wailing hysteria as though the season is already over? You're still tied for first place Yankee fanboys, it's a little early to tear all your hair out of your head.

Before the season, what odds would I have gotten betting that in the "everyone makes the playoffs!" first year that neither the Yankees nor the Red Sox would be playing in postseason?

Profit?

Schadenfreude.

All of those teams have lost players just as good as Mariano Rivera, Alex Rodriguez, Mark Teixeira, C.C. Sabathia, Andy Pettitte, Brett Gardner and Michael Pineda.

I'd take Longoria over all those guys except maybe CC.

when we win, the other gus (losers) who complain about injuries are whiners.
when we even MIGHT lose with a pile of old guys who got hurt, it's those nasty injuries.
every fanboy thinks their team gets hurt more than the other guy.
Mariano had 18 healthy years; did we ever hear "boy we sure were really really REALLY lucky Mo wasn't hurt in the fall of 98, 98, 99, 00, 03, 09...."

Orioles-Pirates.

That's the WS matchup and I cannot wait for it.

McCoy is probably right about how networks will feel. Of course, I don't care a whit. Perhaps if MLB marketed something other than three teams, they wouldn't have to be concerned.

The networks are going to go ape if the Boston, NY, LA, and Chicago markets don't have a playoff team.

Some might say that's only true regarding the Cubs, not the White Sox. To some network suits, the Tigers might actually be preferable to the Chisox.

The nightmare gets even worse for them if Oak & SF and Bal & DC make it into the playoffs. Both sets play within the same market as the other partner in the set and thus have a lower marginal value than a team from a different market making it into the playoffs. If Boston, NY, LA, and Chicago don't get in and the two sets of teams that I mentioned do get in this might just be the lowest watched baseball playoffs of all time and it might not be even close.

The "same market syndrome" more applies with the World Series as opposed to the playoffs as a whole.

Oak, Det, Balt, & TB with DC, Cincin, SF, Pitt might just cause some deaths at the networks. The addition of either STL or ATL instead of Pitt would probably only cause heart attacks and not actual deaths at the networks but at the moment I can't actually think which of those two teams would be worse for the networks. ATL and TB are pretty close regionally though TB isn't exactly on equal footing with ATL in terms of eyeballs. STL has a pretty strong following and I don't think Cincin gets in the way.

Hard to say what the worst World Series ratings draw would be. Tampa Bay's a relatively small market with no following, and while Pittsburgh and Cincinnati are small markets, both are at least pre-expansion franchises with established fan bases. Washington's a top 10 market, but the Nationals are relatively new, and it will take a while to establish a regional fan base -- especially since DC has next to no recent experience in this sort of thing, at least where MLB is concerned. In contrast, the Texas Rangers had a few divisional titles in the late '90s before their recent run of success.

Orioles-Pirates.

That's the WS matchup and I cannot wait for it.

I sure hope it'd be a better one than the last time those teams met in 1979. That was one of the worst played World Series of all time, and it didn't help that every goddam game was played in either rain or snow flurries.

The "same market syndrome" more applies with the World Series as opposed to the playoffs as a whole.

Well, obviously if it is just one game a day it means more but it still means a lot that instead of 4 different markets having a team in the playoffs there is only 2 markets with 4 teams in the playoffs.

Based on Coolstandings playoff odds, and assuming that all play-in/play-off series are tossups, Orioles-Pirates is the 54th most likely world series matchup, with 400-1 odds.

Texas versus any one of the NL division leaders are the three most likely, at ~20-1 each.

Oakland-SF is #17, at 39-1
Baltimore-Washington is #20, at 43-1.
Yankees-Dodgers is #37, at 126-1
LA-LA is #55, at 726 to 1

Texas versus any one of the NL division leaders are the three most likely, at ~20-1 each.

If Rangers-Nationals, expect to see plenty of pics of Frank Howard and Ted Williams in both Senators and Rangers uniforms.

If Texas-Cincinnati, expect to see some chili discussions (no beans, please).

when we win, the other gus (losers) who complain about injuries are whiners.
when we even MIGHT lose with a pile of old guys who got hurt, it's those nasty injuries.
every fanboy thinks their team gets hurt more than the other guy.
Mariano had 18 healthy years; did we ever hear "boy we sure were really really REALLY lucky Mo wasn't hurt in the fall of 98, 98, 99, 00, 03, 09...."


Of course, a significant proportion of underperforming teams probably ARE disproportionately affected by injury - the reason they're underperforming in the first place. So it makes sense that complaining about injury correlates with underperformance.

And, not that I'd expect you to know my posting history, but I've frequently and effusively praised the Yankees training staff for minimizing the impact of chronic injuries - in stark contrast to, e.g., the Red Sox. They Yankees have definitely been injury-lucky the last few years, some of which is probably ascribable to as-yet-unknowable training ninja skills. Broken bones, though, are just God's pistol shooting into a crowd.

I don't think the objections should have been directed at your whining over injuries, but at the "isn't particularly close" portion. There's no way the Yankees, at any point this season, have been head-and-shoulders ahead of the two-time defending AL champs who have sat in first in the stronger AL West all season.

For all this talk about how good the Yankees are on paper they sure haven't played all that well. .500 record in May and a .500 record in July coupled with a 2 games above .500 August doesn't seem like things a very good team should do.

Others who wake up before noon have basically made me points for me. Sabathia hasn't missed much time and none of the others should have been counted on to be high-performance players anyway except Rivera's 50+ remaining innings. Players like A-Rod and Teixeira haven't missed a ton of time either. Besides, getting 94 games out of Eric Chavez negates any sort of injury bad-luck.

Every team in the AL East has gotten rocked by injuries, just because the players aren't overpaid or famous Yankees doesn't mean their loss hasn't hurt their team. The problem for the Yankees is that they built up that huge division lead while being healthier than their opposition and now that the tables have turned they're running into the same problems.

Wow, who will Tim McCarver and Joe Buck get lathered up over if Jeter isnt in the playoffs?

Also ESPN is actually going to have to talk about some other teams for once which might be nice.

On this date in 1989, the Orioles trailed the Jays by a game. The O's were playing in Cleveland and Cal sent a drive to the CF wall; Brad Komminsk initially caught the ball but fell over the fence doing so, and Cal is credited with his 20th home run. (Later, an outfield camera reveals that Brad dropped the ball when he fell over the fence.) Cal doubles in the go-ahead run in the seventh, and Larry Sheets follows with another. Bob Milacki and Gregg Olson team to shut down the Indians, but the Jays win, also.

Angels jump out to a 3-0 lead. Torii Hunter's just about the hottest hitter in the league right now, right?

A's get one back, but leave the bases loaded. 3-1 after 3. I'm really nervous. Pennant fever is awesomely terrible.

OH, ####. Aybar just lined a pitch up the middle, right off Brandon McCarthy's head.

Might be time to start batting Reddick 6th again since he seems to have issues with RISP.

Oh, Angel bullpen, please don't suck again. Please don't suck again.

Oh, that was HUGE.

Would it kill them to put the ball in play with RISP instead of striking out?

Things might be starting to fall apart in Oakland.

EDIT: Things have fallen apart in Oakland.

Thank you Angels.

Nice to see the offense and bullpen crap the bed in this series.

I'm going to take a moment to do a little dance of joy for my Angels. They needed a sweep, and they got it. Now, they need to take care of business at home against Detroit and Oakland.

Not. Dead. Yet. Yanks are alone in 1st place, again, actually.