When the season began waaayyyyy back in March, and waaaayyyyyy over on the other side of the
Completing the ALCS match-up, are the plucky, overachiev…nope, Tampa Bay didn't get here on good karma. They have a quirky manager who actually studies statistics (gasp!), and a roster full of power pitchers who aren’t intimidated by anyone. Hell, they won the best division in baseball- and nearly did it wire to wire. They may have thoroughbreds in the rotation, but their offense is a mosaic of players. From the vagabond slugger (Carlos Pena), the Japanese import (Akinori Iwamura), the young stud (Evan Longoria) and of course…the veteran presence (Cliff Floyd), the Rays have a blend of players that has propelled them beyond any of the expert’s predictions. If that’s not enough for ya, think of the
Over in the NL, it’s a East-Coast vs. West-Coast duel. The Dodgers have endeared themselves to me based solely on their sweeping of the Cubs. Manny. Joe Torre. We know them. What should we know about them, is just as important as the big names that came from out east. LA has a young nucleus of players (Blake DeWitt, James Loney, Andrew Ethier, Matt Kemp, Russell Martin, Chad Billingsley) that has provided a boost to a team that signed a few too many big name free agent disasters (Jason Schmidt, Juan Pierre, Andruw Jones) over the past couple off seasons. Their closer goes down early in the season? No problem- former set up man Jonathan Broxton steps in and performs well. Joe Beimel is their fire fighter coming out of the bullpen. With Rafael Furcal missing a majority of the season, and Jeff Kent finally showing some signs of aging, the Dodgers offense sputtered for a great deal of the season. GM Ned Colletti had a big payroll that was almost all of his doing, and his franchise was looking at a 21st straight season without a post season series win. Enter Casey Blake, who at 35, is having himself a career season. Then in a true 12th hour move, Colletti landed the biggest fish of them all- the elusive, finicky Manny. I don’t know if he calmed down the clubhouse, made the team looser or helped the guys in front of him see more fastballs. What I do know, is that Man-Ram slugged .743, hit 17 homers and amassed an OPS+ of 213 in his 53 games as a Dodger. Colletti could have saved his job with that move, but he most certainly saved his team’s season.
3,000 miles away in
2) Improved starting pitching
3) Improved bullpen
4) Chase Utley
5) The Phillie Phanatic stopped wearing clothes under his costume in the beginning of August, thus bringing about good karma
6) Ryan Howard
Ok. I’m done quasi-bashing Ryan Howard. This is only important to me because I have a terrible feeling that he may get more votes for MVP than Lance will. Personal vendettas aside, the Phillies did what smart teams do in the off season (This part is for you, Drayton): Improve their pitching staff. Pitching wins. None of these teams rank outside the top five in their respective leagues in ERA. LA is first in the NL, and the Rays are second in the