In the twentysome hours between the Yankees loss to the Tigers on Monday night and the first pitch of Game 4 on Tuesday, everything focused on AJ Burnett. A team with a $207 million payroll was forced to put their postseason life on the arm of a pitcher with a 5.15 ERA. Yankee fans bemoaned […]

Through six innings in St. Petersburg tonight, it looked like the Tampa Bay Rays had a chance to seize control of things with a typical Rays win. Even though they only had one hit against Colby Lewis, that hit was a solo homer from Desmond Jennings and they held a 1-0 lead. It wasn’t ideal, […]

I assume that a lot of attention is going to be paid to the Cardinals/Phillies series when the NLDS kicks off on Saturday. The Cards lit the world on fire to sneak into the playoffs and the Phillies are the Phillies; baseball’s best record, baseball’s best pitching staff, three trips to at least the NLCS […]

Pitching wins championships. It’s one of baseball’s oldest adages, and there must be some truth to it. If it weren’t true, how else can you explain the 2010 World Series Champion San Francisco Giants? If pitching wins championships, the next logical step is to say that the Philadelphia Phillies are going to win this year’s […]

The Tampa Bay Rays are already the least likely playoff team in history. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight looked at all of the various things that had to happen for the Rays to catch the Red Sox and to do it by coming back from a seven-run deficit and from being down to their last strike […]

When August ended, the Boston Red Sox lead the Yankees by a game and a half and the Rays by nine games in the AL East. Since then, the Rays have gone 15-10, which is worse than all three of the surefire American League playoff teams and the Royals in September, but they’ve closed the entire […]

Three fringe playoff contenders were in action on Thursday night while the two teams they’re chasing had the night off. That reduced Thursday to a simple equation for the Rays, Angels, and Cardinals: win, and stay in the thick of their respective wild card races, lose and risk falling by the wayside as the final […]

Because Boston is one of the two poles of the ESPN/FOX/Bud Selig baseball empire and because Red Sox fans have been freaking out so hilariously in the last week, most baseball fans have their eyes fixed on the American League wild card race. This is despite the fact that the Red Sox have five games […]

Prince Fielder is probably not heading back to Milwaukee. We were already pretty certain of that, but now everyone’s almost completely sure. To be fair, there’s an entire post-season between now and Prince’s last game in a Brewer uniform and the Brewers certainly have a shot at making deep run into the playoffs this year […]

The Tampa Bay Rays are longshots to win the AL wild card. Even if they sweep the Red Sox this weekend, their schedule down the stretch is much tougher than Boston’s and it might not end up mattering. That doesn’t mean the Rays aren’t doing everything they can to vault themselves into the playoffs.  Entering […]

With a 3-2 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals this afternoon, the Pittsburgh Pirates clinched their record (as in, “all North American sports” record, not just Major League Baseball) 19th consecutive losing season. The Pirates have actually held this record since they clinched their 17th consecutive losing season in 2009, which broke the previous North […]

After our esteemed Outside Corner team took a long look this afternoon at two late-charging entries into this season’s wild card races, the Tampa Bay Rays and St. Louis Cardinals both found themselves in position to make even more headway in their improbable playoff runs. Only one team succeeded, though, while the other was left […]

With Justin Verlander’s 22 wins re-igniting the “do pitcher’s wins matter” debate in the American League, Ian Kennedy may be very quietly doing the same thing himself in the National League. Last night, he threw 7 2/3 innings, allowing one run and striking out 11 Padres to earn his 19th victory of 2011, most on […]

Jesus Montero has been impossible to avoid the last two years. The nature of baseball in the early 21st century is that when a Yankee prospect begins destroying the ball at the age of 19 in Double-A, it’s impossible to not know about the guy. So Montero entered the collective consciousness of baseball fans after the […]

On August 1st, the Cardinals lost to the Brewers to fall 3 1/2 games back in the NL Central. If you’d told them after that game that in exactly one month they’d be finishing up a sweep of the Brewers in Milwaukee, then made them guess where they’d be in relation to the Brewers in […]