With the 2011 season heading towards August and the White Sox five games out of first place, talk on the South Side of Chicago has headed for the place it always seems to head at this time of year: to questioning Ozzie Guillen’s job security. The Chicago Sun-Times is reporting today that the relationship between […]

There is a lot of baseball left to be played in 2011. With a month of games left on the schedule, no five-game lead in any division is truly safe. That being said, though, I can’t help but wonder if time is running out on the San Francisco Giants bid to repeat as World Series […]

Baseball has been around for a long time. When the National League was founded in 1876, Ulysses S. Grant was president. Grant is, of course, famous for his role as the commander of the Union army in the Civil War. Now it’s 2011 and Barack Obama is president and the National League is still playing […]

On Friday morning, it looked like the AL Central was shaping up to be one of the better division races in baseball. The Indians had reeled off seven wins in ten games to close a four-game Detroit lead to a 1 1/2 game gap. A three-game set between the Tribe and the Tigers — the […]

For most people, the NL Cy Young race probably starts and ends with Roy Halladay in 2011. That’s fine: Halladay’s 2011 season is more or less a continuation of his excellent 2010 year that earned him the NL Cy in his first year in the Senior Circuit. In Los Angeles, though, Clayton Kershaw is quietly […]

With Jim Thome’s 600th home run on Monday night, the ensuing Hall of Fame debate about the slugger was more or less inevitable. Most people, myself included, see a guy with 600 home runs and a long, long run as an elite big league power hitter and assume that that makes for a slam dunk […]

Jim Thome has been hitting home runs for nearly as long as I’ve been watching baseball. To be exact, he’s been hitting them since October 4, 1991, when he hit a two-run shot off of Steve Farr in the top of the ninth inning to give the Indians a 3-2 win over the Yankees. Since […]

With two innings to play, it looked like maybe the Arizona Diamondbacks first stay alone atop the NL West standings since late June was going to be short-lived. Facing down a 5-1 deficit at the hands of the Houston Astros that would’ve dropped them into a tie for first with the Giants, the Diamondback offense […]

Lyle Overbay hit the free agent market yesterday after his release by the Pittsburgh Pirates, and there’s a good chance that his big league career is over. In 103 games with the Pirates this year, Overbay hit just .227/.300/.349 with eight homers and 17 doubles in 391 plate appearances. Even in 2011’s severely reduced offensive […]

There’s not really any wrong way to end a ten-game losing streak, but Charlie Morton and the Pirates managed to do it with some flair last night as Morton tossed eight shutout innings and the Pirates bounced back from nearly two solid weeks of losing by shutting out the NL West leading Giants by a […]

The Rays and Blue Jays played an epic game in Tampa yesterday afternoon. After nine innings, the score was tied at three. After ten, it was tied at four. After 11, it was tied at six. Finally it ended in the 12th, when Robinson Chirinos singled in BJ Upton to give the Rays a 7-6 […]

With the Brewers and Cardinals playing an incredibly important three-game series this week, Tony La Russa has gone ahead and done what he’s always done best: make the baseball games that he’s involved with about him and only him.   Before last night’s Cardinals/Brewers’ game, La Russa filed an official complaint about the lighting at […]

The trade deadline’s over and there are a bunch of guys wearing different color uniforms than they wore last week. All of them are hoping that they can make a difference in their new homes and take their new teams to heights that their old teams weren’t going to reach. So on the first day […]

With a seven-run seventh inning, the Tampa Bay Rays rolled to a 10-8 win over the Oakland A’s in Oakland last night to bring their record to 54-50. That record is a good approximation of how good the Rays have been this year; they’ve scored 436 runs (seventh in the American League) and allowed 420 […]

The Mets and Giants are very close to completing a deal to send Carlos Beltran across the country to the NL West leaders, according to multiple reports this afternoon,