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1. The Mariners and Red Sox were the favorites to win their respective divisions entering this season, largely on the strength canada goose deals of high expectations for their offenses.
2. These five teams ranked 12th (Boston), 14th (Texas), 20th (Pittsburgh), 26th (Seattle), and 30th (Chicago) in OPS+ in the first half.
buy canada goose jacket cheap 3. Not one of these teams has made a substantial in season addition. All of the improvement from their dreadful first halves to their killer second halves has been in the form of the players on hand playing better. The Red Sox, Mariners and White Sox have even traded starting players since the All Star break. buy canada goose jacket cheap
canada goose coats on sale It probably too late for Seattle, canada goose black friday sale Chicago or Boston to climb back into the AL wild card race. Still, here are three teams that are currently doing something closely akin to what many thought they might do before the season began “right on the heels of three plus months of doing the polar opposite. (The opposite end of the list is a bit less notable, but you can find the Nationals (who were 11th in OPS+ in the first half, despite missing even more of their projected starting lineup than they TMre missing now for most of that time) third from the bottom. Maybe things have always been this way, and we just measure and track and feel it all more in 2015, but variance in team performance appears to be on the rise. canada goose coats on sale
More than ever, it feels as though the long season is a lie, the same way a survey sample of a huge number of people can still be unreliable. Big numbers give data the veneer of legitimacy and trustworthiness, but sometimes the confidence they inspire can be misgiven. It seems like 162 games just doesn TMt really tell us how good a baseball team is (though it still tells us more than a best of seven series).
canada goose store Teams play widely varying and often strangely built schedules. On Tuesday, the Cubs will play their 11th consecutive game in the city of Chicago, and they still have a week left to go. From Sept. 4 through Oct. canada goose clearance 1, the Indians will play 27 straight games within their division: seven each against the Tigers, Royals, and Twins, and six against the White Sox. The Diamondbacks, on the other hand, are in the middle of a 40 game stretch wherein they don TMt play a fellow NL West team. canada goose store
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It TMs also a dead model. We TMve killed that version of baseball, by learning so much about this delightfully complex (yet deceptively simple) game that treating any particular string of 162 games like some end all, be all is impossible to square with logic. We TMve killed it by shortening our attention spans and embracing our most reactive, reflexive selves, forgetting to turn off our senses of urgency and cataclysm and salacity when we turn the channel from the news to ESPN. We TMve killed it by consuming baseball as if it were football, a phenomenon neither MLB itself nor its broadcast partners could miss, all but forcing them to adapt themselves to a football style, event centered version of the game. Tons of Red Sox Yankees games. All the playoff inventory canada goose outlet that can fit into the first half of NFL season.
Baseball isn TMt dying; this is not that column. Baseball is thriving; it just isn TMt going to be the baseball your dad took you to see, or the baseball you Canada Goose Parka read about in the work of David Halberstam and Roger Angell. In the face of a culture that started to run away from it, baseball changed, and its changes have worked. The game is healthy, and the product on the field is tremendous. You just have to remember that everything in baseball, from now on, is going to be like the AL Wild Card race. There won TMt be canada goose coats on sale perennial weak sisters, and there definitely won TMt be “there haven been for a few years, already “dynasties. Just when you think a team has totally flopped, it TMll win 42 of 50, the way the 2013 Dodgers did. Just when you think a team has the system beaten, it TMll fall hilariously short of its lofty expectations, the way the 2013 (and, it would appear, 2015) Nationals did. Seasons don TMt tell us who the best teams are anymore; neither do postseasons. If you really want to know who the best team of any baseball season after 2011 was, keep that question in mind, and remember to ask God, if the two of you ever meet. There no other way you TMll Canada Goose sale ever find out.
