If you know the right sites, and if you’re adept at trawling the internet for obscure baseball stories, you could find little nuggets, like this: The Red Sox are playing the Yankees this weekend.
MLB Weekend Preview: Yankees Vs. Red Sox (And More!)
Here are three series to keep an eye on over the weekend:
It seems like just last month that the Red Sox were 2-10 and five games back. Probably because it was last month. Since then, the Red Sox have gone 15-10, which puts them ... five games back. That early hiccup will likely haunt them for a while. If there’s good news for the Red Sox, it’s that a) none of their hitters are playing over their heads, and b) Carl Crawford and Dustin Pedroia are clearly playing under their heads. John Lackey might be broken, and that’s a huge problem, but it’s about the only problem that seems like it might not be fixed at some point during the season.
The Yankees have been quite good this year, which isn’t exactly a surprise, but their starting rotation has been deep and consistent, which is. With Phil Hughes trying to reanimate his dead arm away from the roster, the Yankees have somehow cobbled together five starting pitchers who are all performing well. CC Sabathia was a given, and, okay, A.J. Burnett was a decent-enough rebound candidate, but Freddy Garcia? Ivan Nova, who couldn’t manage a league-average strikeout rate in the International League? He wasn’t exactly sharp on Thursday night, but whatever the Yankees were doing before that, it’s been working.
It’d be fun to go back in time and try to convince someone that giving Bartolo Colon a 4/$30M deal might be a better use of the Boston’s money than would John Lackey. You’d get banned from a lot of message boards and blogs if you were persistent enough.
And from the player mugshot well:
Those two are facing off this weekend. I was going to write a "Who’s on First"-type sketch with Bartolo Colon as the owner of a pizza parlor and Clay Buchholz as a patron trying to get his pizza quickly because he’s late for a Nickelback concert. Colon would have responded with something like, "Nickel back? I ain’t even givin’ you a penny!" and this would have gone on for a while. I stopped writing it, though, when I had to think about Nickelback for more than five seconds.
Scheduled starters:
The Phillies rebounded nicely from their series loss to the Braves last weekend, taking two out of three from the upstart Marlins*. It’s an amazing run the Phillies are on, considering that 3/8ths of the lineup has been sub-Neifi with the bat, and 40 percent of the rotation has missed a chunk of time. It’s a team with a record that suggests four aces, a healthy Chase Utley, and an ageless Raul Ibanez. As is, the aces have been enough. Out of 459 combined batters against Cliff Lee and Roy Halladay, 130 have struck out and 16 have walked. That’s pretty freaky.
An aside: I took the liberty of copyrighting the term “upstart Marlins,” so I’ll get some sweet residuals for the rest of the summer. Feelin’ smart, like those geniuses in 1998 who went around and registered 100s of domain names like baseball-lamp-shades.com, and are sitting pretty on some Caribbean beach right now.
After the high of taking the match-up last weekend, the Braves almost had an ugly low with the Nationals almost sweeping them in Atlanta. If Martin Prado didn’t nick the seam of a Sean Burnett breaking ball, he wouldn’t have stayed alive to hit the game-tying grand slam in the last game of the series. That was the difference between getting swept and having a little confidence before the Phillies came to town -- the tippiest of foul tips. That’s baseball, they say. Or a piece of it, at least. It’s still May, but this is the kind of series that teams look back on when they’re at home in October, wondering what might have been.
Scheduled starters
The Royals had cooled down a little before heading into New York, so it seemed like there was a little order in the universe. A strong weekend at home for the Tigers would have put some distance between second and third place once the Yankees took at least two from the Royals, which would tie in neatly with what we expected at the beginning of the year.
Except the Royals have earned their record -- it’s not like they’re playing above .500 with a fluky run differential -- so the Tigers just shouldn’t assume that second place, and eventually first place, is theirs by divine right. Now that we’re living in a world that will forever be defined as pre-Hosmer and post-Hosmer -- it’s safe to get that tattoo now -- it’s probably time to take the Royals seriously.
If there’s something to dull the excitement of a surprisingly competitive series, it’s with the probable starters. You start with Luke Hochevar (live arm with unrealized potential), get a little disillusioned when you get to Jeff Francis (a solid why not? reclamation gamble), and when you get to Kyle Davies (Kyle Davies), you realize that the Royals have a lot of sifting through their current roster to get to some sort of happy contending equilibrium. Meanwhile, the Tigers are starting two studs and a reclamation type, so you can understand why it might seem like the two teams could go in different directions at any time.
But then again, the Royals went into New York and took a series against the Yankees, dismantling them in the final game. That’s impressive for any team to do. Doubt the Royals at your own peril.
Yeah, I thought that was an internet first. But it’s a new era! Post-Hosmer. Tell your kids where you were.
Scheduled starters
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