So, at the All-Star break, with 87 games under their belt, the World Champion Red Sox look much better than the 2004 team, at first glance. They are in 1st, up by 2 games over Baltimore, while the 2004 squad was in 2nd, down by 7 games to New York. That's an impressive 9-game swing. And they did all this without their ace, and with their closer being injured and totally ineffective.

 

In  reality, however, they are playing just barely better than they did at the All-Star break last year -- .563 vs. .558, an improvement of just .005 in the W-L percentages, though have played one more game this year. By some measures, they are playing worse. This year, they have only a 44-run edge in runs scored vs. runs against. Last year, their margin at the break was 80 runs. They had scored 9 more runs last year at the break, and, crucially, they had allowed a full 27 fewer runs.

 

The big swing in the standings isn't so much due to the Sox being better, but to the Yankees being far worse. NY's W-L percentage is down over 100 points from the 2004 break -- just .535, vs. .640. But the Yankees are coming. In the past 10 games, the Sox have significantly weakened their position, going 5-5, while NY went 7-3.

 

What that means is that, to make the playoffs, the Sox may need almost as good a pre-September run as the phenomenal streak they put together last year, especially since, this year, the Wild Card slot may not be available to a team in the East. To win, say, the same 98 games they did last year, they will need to play 49-26 ball the rest of the season, or a .653 clip. That's doable, especially since they have a very high percentage of games at home. But, it will be very hard with the current pitching.

 

In fact, it's only a little easier than the .658 ball (50-26) the Sox played after the break last year, to get to 98 wins. That pace would be exactly .100 points in the W-L better than they have done so far.

The team ERA of 4.84 and WHIP of 1.40 are both the worst in the A.L., except for the two disastrous losers, KC and TB.

 

The team batting average of .282 leads the league, but the Sox don't lead in any other major offensive category except doubles, though they are close in OPS, OPB and RBIs.

The Red Sox tonight have dethroned Baltimore, and lead the division for the first time since April 23 -- two months ago. Over the last 10 games, Boston's 9-1 record is the best in the majors.

They've won 5 in a row, 10 of their last 11, and are now finally even on the road, 20-20.

Meanwhile, the Yankees are 5.5 games back, only one game over .500. They are 14-19 on the road, and have lost 3 in a row.

We Washingtonians knew having baseball back this season would be fun. But who could have predicted what's happening now? The Washington Nationals have already drawn over a million in less than two months, eclipsing the best attendance the old Senators recorded for a whole season. And the Nats are in first place in the most competitive division in baseball, the N.L. East. Incredibly, this is "later" in the season than any Senators team held first place after 1933. (Which helps explain the awful attendance figures for the Senators.)

And, for the first time, both of this area's teams are in first, since the Orioles remain atop the A.L. East (though not for long, if we Red Sox fans have our way.)

I certainly don't expect the Nats to win the pennant, or even to necessarily make the playoffs. But they are very exciting, and, in a town whose Redskins have been out of the playoffs since forever, it's great to have a contender to stand alongside the NBA Wizards, who returned to the playoffs this year after a long, long drought.

             

        I was in Chicago Saturday for the first-ever regular season series between two of the most storied franchises in baseball, the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs. The teams last faced off in the 1918 World Series, the Red Sox's last Series victory until 2004. This also marks Boston's first visit to the Cubs' Wrigley Field, which is the second-oldest and second-smallest major league ballpark, next to Boston's own Fenway Park. (In 1918, the Cubs' World Series home games were played at a different, larger ballpark, to maximize revenues.)

        The two stadiums, and their home teams, are often compared -- for character, for losing, for color, for great fans -- so this weekend series between them is a big deal. Last year, the Red Sox ended an 86- year World Series drought. That gave the Cubs hope that, this year, they might shake off their own, much longer, drought, which has now lasted 97 years. In fact, the Cubs haven't even been in the World Series for decades, and have had many fewer winning seasons and playoff appearances than the Red Sox.

        Here is my account of game day at what Cubs fans call "The Friendly Confines of Wrigley Field," or just "The Friendly Confines."

        Two hours before game time, the city is crawling with Red Sox fans. In my hotel today, which isn't even near Wrigley, I spied a dozen or so people in Sox caps and shirts. And I just finished a 2-hour stroll through downtown and the lakefront with my pal Phil Revzin, a Chicago native and Cubs fan (each of us wearing our respective insignia) during which we literally must have seen 30 or 40 more.

        I get the impression that most of these aren't Red Sox fans who happen to live around here. They are people who -- like me --drove in, or flew in, from distant points, including New England. And they likely paid a lot to scalpers for tickets.

        Amazing. But here's an even more amazing fact: in two days here, I have yet to see a single cap, shirt, sign or bumper sticker bearing the White Sox logo, despite the fabulous season they are having. The Pale Hose haven't won the World Series since 1917, or been in it since 1959, and this year they are threatening to do both. But you can't detect that in downtown Chicago. Granted, I haven't been on the South Side, the White Sox bastion, but downtown should be theoretically a mix of both teams' fans. Yet, it's all Cubs.

        I take a cab to Wrigley, a half-hour ride through lovely parks and neat, well-kept residential streets, and arrive about 45 minutes early. I walk around and soak up the atmosphere.

        Like Fenway, Wrigley is in a real neighborhood, a real building on a real street. Like Fenway, it has no parking lots surrounding it, just a nearby public transit stop. But the streets are much roomier and residential than the ones surrounding Fenway. They are big enough for buses to stop in a wall-to-wall formation. And the street vendors, while lively, are much less colorful than Boston's. There is nothing that I can see like the Sausage King on Lansdowne street, the stand where the sausage vendors wear large fake-fur royal crowns.

        Our seats are great -- about 12 rows from the field, just past first base and the Red Sox dugout. I have invited a Chicago-area friend to join us, and Phil has brought his 90-year old Uncle, who tells us he has been going to games at this very same ballpark since 1925.

        The food is good, the drinks are cold, the grass is greener than green, and the sun is out. The only bad thing is the weekend-long heat and humidity, which is so punishing that ESPN describes it this way: "Think Philippines rain forest, and that's what it was like at Wrigley Field Friday. Eighty-nine degrees. Eleven-thousand percent humidity. Even the sweat sweated."

        Because of the heat, Phil's uncle winds up watching most of the game on TV in an air-conditioned restaurant under the stands. We join him there for about an inning.

        On top of that, the Red Sox lose the game, for the second time in a row, because of pitching. Our starter, Wade Miller, is only fair, and the bullpen is awful. (My earlier posting here about how the Boston pitching was surprisingly good has turned out to be, well, surprisingly wrong.)

        And it isn't fun watching the Yankees smoke the Cardinals on the creaky old scoreboard at Wrigley, which makes Fenway's look like HDTV. The Cubs fans are rooting for the Yanks since the Cardinals are their big rival, their version of New York.

        Despite the loss and the sweltering heat, however, the overall experience is just excellent.

        Inside, Wrigley is almost as cozy as Fenway. It has about 3,000 more seats, mainly due to an upper deck which makes it less intimate than Fenway. But, in the outfield, with its low, Ivy-covered walls and clear views of neighborhood buildings, it feels even smaller and older than Fenway, which had been open for two years when Wrigley came online in 1914.

        I estimate that 30% of the capacity crowd is Red Sox fans, in all manner of the usual regalia -- including women with pink Sox caps and people with the green St. Pat's day shirts and caps. I even spot one guy with a Sox cap and T-shirt from the "Foxy Lady", a strip club in Providence.

        This seems to amaze the Cubs fans, but also to delight them. They are the fans who show up at rival National League parks, like we do in the A.L. And they are not used to being invaded. But they turn out to be very friendly, and the atmosphere is neighborly, nothing like going to Yankee Stadium in a Red Sox cap.

        We do the usual "Let's Go, Red Sox," cheers, just as if we were at Fenway, and the Cubs fans only try once to drown us out with boos. After that, they mainly smile or shrug at it.

        Several of the Cubs faithful approach tell me how much they rooted for the Sox in the '04 post-season, or talk about their trips to Fenway. There are lots of Sox fans who, like me, were attending with friends in Cubs attire.

        The Cubs organization seemed friendly, too. They had a big sign near the ballpark that read "One curse down -- one more to go." And they played Sweet Caroline in the late innings -- people sang, just like at Fenway. I saw a couple of bars with professionally printed signs in the window with the Red Sox logo and a big headline saying "Welcome, Red Sox fans."

        When the Cubs won, I heard almost no gloating, and lots of Sox fans congratulated their Cub-fan neighbors.

        All in all, a good experience.

Curt Schilling is having a tough start to his season, losing several games despite being handed solid leads. Red Sox Nation is worried. But I'm not. I think Schilling is just coming back slowly from his ankle injury and a too-brief spring training. I think he'll come around soon. Meanwhile, two of the Sox' new starters, Matt Clement and David Wells, seem finally to be in the groove. And that's great news, since the starting rotation had been the big question going into this season. We won't know the whole starting situation until we see how Wade Miller does after his long rehab when he returns next month. And, of course, how Schilling's season evolves. But I'm cautiously optimistic. Right now, I'd rather have our starters than the Yankees', even though I fully expect Randy Johnson to have a season more like his great outing today than his stumbling starts earlier in the year.

When people call the Red Sox fan base "Red Sox Nation," it's no mere catch phrase. Far from New England, rabid Red Sox fans follow the team into the ball parks of opposing teams in numbers that are amazing. This morning's Baltimore Sun, for instance, has a column by David Steele about last night's impressive 8-0 Red Sox win against the very hot Orioles, a David Wells performance that moved the Sox into a tie with the O's for first place in the A.L. East, while the Yankees flounder towards the bottom of the division.

One point Steele makes is that Red Sox fans far outnumbered the home fans at Camden Yards last night, and outnumbered the Yankee fans who showed up for the recent O's series against NY. Says Steele: "

At least the Orioles will know how to handle hostile crowds. Last night's was the biggest slap in the face this season, and that's saying a lot. The sellouts last weekend were probably 50 percent pinstripes, at most. Last night's crowd of 36,478 was pushing three-quarters Red Sox fans.

They showed up early, cheered every Wells strikeout, roared for Johnny and Manny and Jason and, during the seventh-inning stretch, drowned out the locals by shouting, "Root, root root for the Red Sox," as clearly as they would on Yawkey Way.

I've lived in Washington, DC, for over 30 years -- and, until two weeks ago, I had no local baseball team. Now, we have the Washington Nationals, and I'm pleased and surprised to say they are really catching on. They've sold something like 22,000 season tickets and have attracted large crowds for their first home stand. Everywhere you go in DC and its suburbs, you see people wearing Nats caps. It's great.

I remain a Boston Red Sox fan. The Sox will always be my first love. But I now have a National League squad to root for as well, and I am enjoying it.

 

As a life-long Red Sox fan, I have long hated the Yankees. But I have to say that the current iteration of the Bombers has some real classy people. I'm thinking of Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Bernie Williams, and the classiest of all, manager Joe Torre. He proved his class by leading the Yanks in respectfully watching every minute of the Red Sox world series ceremony from the visitor's dugout last week at Fenway Park. The Sox manager, Terry Francona, publicly saluted Torre for that.

So it was really nauseating to see the Yankees' no-class owner, George Steinbrenner, publicly warn Torre to improve the team's poor record of the first two weeks of the season. He seemed to be hinting Torre could be canned if the Yanks didn't do better. If he ever fired Torre, it'd be great for the Red Sox, but a big loss for baseball.

It's the middle of April, 70 degrees and sunny in Washington, and thank goodness baseball is back. There's something pastoral and soothing and noble and American about baseball. It's a real family game, and a great source of sports debates and arguments.

Being a native New Englander, I've been a Boston Red Sox fan for 50 years, ever since my Dad first took me to a Red Sox game. So last year was the greatest year in my life as a sports fan, because the Sox finally won the World Series after staging the greatest post-season comeback in the history of American professional sports, first crushing the rival Yankees and then sweeping the World Series against St. Louis.

But last week was almost as wonderful. First, my wife Edie and I went to Boston with friends for the Red Sox home opener at Fenway Park, where they unfurled the championship banner and gave the World Series rings, not only to the players, but to everyone down to the bat boys. It was very emotional for me. They even had Boston Symphony and Pops musicians in center field, James Taylor singing at the plate, and wounded war veterans delivering the rings. All the famous old Red Sox players were there -- Dom DiMaggio, Carl Yastrzemski, Jim Rice, Louis Tiant, etc. And, for the coup de grace, the first ball(s) were thrown out by Boston sports heroes from other sports -- Bill Russell of the Celtics, Bobby Orr of the Bruins, and Richard Seymour and Tedy Bruschi of the Patriots. To top it off, the Sox went on to trounce the Yankees 8-1.

Then, we went to the home opener of the Washington Nationals, the new team in our home town. They also had a great ceremony, with fireworks and appearances by old players and President Bush throwing out the first pitch. Old RFK stadium, the Nats' temporary home while a fancy new ballpark is being buit, was sold out with 45,000 fans. And the Nats beat the Arizona Diamondbacks. I'll always be a Red Sox fan, but the Nats will be my National league team.