Walt's Baseball Musings

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.