With April at an end, the Major League standings look quite different than they did at the end of 2008. Five divisions are led by a different team, and only three of last year’s playoff teams would make the post-season now (Boston, Philadelphia and Los Angeles). The Rays are in last place and the Cubs are in fifth. The Royals, Mariners and Marlins are somewhat surprising leaders after a month.
There’s only one truly horrible team, the Washington Nationals. The races are still wide open as 19 of the trailing teams are five games or closer to first place, and the wild card races are very tight.
The teams doing surprisingly well all seem to have good pitching in common. The Mariners, Royals and Blue Jays are 1,2,4 respectively in the American League in ERA, while Pittsburgh and St. Louis are 1-2 in the NL. The Cardinals are there despite losing Chris Carpenter to another injury. Of those teams, Toronto and St. Louis appear to have enough staying power, as they are both scoring runs as well as pitching well.
Let’s hope the rest of the season continues to be this much fun.
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Jayson Stark, my favorite ESPN writer, pokes holes in the myth of horrendous attendance this month:
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=stark_jayson&page=rumblings090430
Turns out that per-game ticket sales were only down 2.9 percent this April compared to last year. Most of that decrease is due to the reduced capacity of the New York parks.
And even the New York teams sold about the same percentage of capacity as last April.
Pretty remarkable in this economy.