The Beasts in the East

The Beasts in the East
By John Chagaris College AP
June 2, 2005
Well it’s been a month since I have had the time to pen a column, first time since April 17th that it is a real column instead of something like Bush or Monkey Yeah, which was pretty funny if you ask me. But now it’s time to focus our attention back to America’s past time, that’s right baseball. If you were to divide the season into nine innings we would be in the bottom half of the second inning, still plenty of time for each team to come back, with the exception of Kansas City. Only one division seems to have a clear cut leader and that comes to my St. Louis Cardinals who are leading the National League Central by a whopping 6.5 games. We have only played 52 games, yet they are 6.5 games up.

Enough about the National League central, there are only two divisions that are going to have multiple teams battling it out for one if not two playoff seeds and they are the beasts in the east. As of writing at 7:12 EST, Baltimore has a 3 game lead over Boston, a 4 game lead over the Jays and a 4.5 game lead over the Yanks. That’s three teams within 4.5 games. Currently the Yanks are on a four game losing streak, as much as I hate the Yankees can you really see them not going on another ten game winning streak. The only thing that the Yankees lack now is something that they lacked all of last year and that is pitching. It seems that once again George went to a nursing home to find his pitching staff. Kevin Brown is 40, Tom Gordon is 37, Buddy Gromm is 39 but he’ll be 40 on July 10th, Randy Johnson is 41, he’ll be 42 by season’s end. Mussina is 36, Pavano is 29, Quantrill is 36, Rivera claims to be only 35 but that age has been questioned for a long time. Mike Stanton just turned 38, Tanyon Sturtze is 24 and Chien-Ming Wang is 25. Out of their whole pitching staff only three are under 30. Their average age comes out to be 35 years old. But then again the whole team is old besides Chien-Ming Wang and Robinson Cano nobody was born in the eighties. Hell nobody was born before 1977 either. Coming down the stretch injuries will continue to come into play with how old this pitching staff is, which The New York Post already dubbing Randy Johnson as the Big useless, how are they going to react down the stretch when the Yanks don’t make the playoffs. while they are getting older the Sox are getting younger, with the exception of david Wells the Sox have young starting pitching. also Baltimore and Toronto have a few young guns and in a few years the Sox and yanks will be battleing for the bottom of the division. But the division to watch is the National League East. Atlanta leads right now with a one game lead over Florida but look at this the Mets and Nationals are tied for third with 2.5 games back and the last place Phillies are 3.5 games back, this division will be fun to follow down the stretch.

Now let’s move on to the NCAA College World Series, and if you are ready for a massacre be lucky because that is what is going to happen when Quinnipiac faces Texas. I have always been against automatic bids because let us face it when a team goes 24-22 do they really deserve to be playing for a national championship? Quinnipiac would be lucky if they scored two runs, and would be even more lucky if they gave up less than 15 runs to Texas, my prediction Texas clobbers QU 20-1.

Well I’m going to head out and try to grab something to kill my headache but before I go I figured I’d catch everybody up on what I’ve been doing and not being able to write. It’s been a combination of traveling to NYC to going to Fenway to working in home Theater, yeah it’s been that simple wish it was more exciting to tell. Well I’m off and hopefully I can get back into the swing of things and update more often.

Ciao,
~Chag