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Go ahead, you can have your American League East title race. Like anyone outside of New England is supposed to care whether the equivalent of Wal-Mart with nuclear capability beats the equivalent of Starbucks with chemical weapons.
And you can have your wild-card race. Forgive me if my pulse doesn't race at the thought of second-place teams.
Me? I'm paying attention to the best and most compelling division in baseball. The National League West.
I know, I know. The Padres lead the NL West with a losing record, and if they don't win three of their remaining five games, they (or the Giants) will become the first team in baseball history to reach the postseason with more losses than wins.
Well, duh. Of course the Padres have a losing record. That's because they play NL West opponents so often. If Atlanta had to face a steady diet of their former division rivals, the Braves wouldn't have 90 wins, either. Atlanta is 12-16 against the West.
Critics will point out that Atlanta and Pittsburgh are the only teams with a losing record against the NL West, to which I can only say this: Evidence, schmevidence. As Carl Everett would argue, who cares about the voluminous fossil records, the centuries of scientific study and the two-story-high dinosaur skeletons in the Museum of Natural History? I'll believe what I want to believe.
And I choose to believe that battling their powerfully stacked division rivals all season long simply wears down NL West teams to the point that they're lucky if they can even field a starting lineup against the rest of the league. It's like when you host a party and serve Red Hook, Fat Tire and Alaskan Amber for the first two hours, then slip in the Miller and Budweiser once everyone is too drunk to notice the difference. You reserve your best stuff for when it matters most. Who cares if you get swept by the Brewers? Milwaukee is in another division. The key is to be ready when you play the Dodgers and Rockies.
The NL West is more demanding than other divisions. In the other divisions, they merely scoreboard watch. In the NL West, you not only have to watch the scoreboards, you have to monitor Barry Bonds' Web site 24/7 just to keep track of what the game's best hitter and most controversial figure is planning to do next and when he might do it.
Hello fans,
I'm back! Despite my previous, somewhat pessimistic entry that I would never walk again because doctors had amputated my leg, it turns out that my knee is fine! I told them to give me some flaxseed oil, but it turns out they made a mistake and injected me with a mixture of Vitamin B-12, jet fuel and weapons-grade plutonium. I glow in the dark, but at least I'll be able to play the final part of the season … as long as the moon is in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligns with Mars.
Oh, and by the way, be sure and check out my online store …
Besides, at last glance, the Padres still had a chance to win 82 games, the same total as the 1973 Mets. If you can match the record of a team that went to the seventh game of the World Series with a roster that included Willie Mays, Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman and Tug McGraw, how bad can you really be?
