Baseball is Here!! MLB 2012!!!!

[Imran Siddiqui]

Not only that, but Braun was fantastic in the minors and was drafted with the 5th pick in the 2005 draft after batting .396 with 18 home runs, and a .726 slugging percentage in his Junior year at Miami. If the guy has been cheating, he's been doing it since he's been a teenager and been so good he's evaded everyone except one test, which just seems implausible.

[OzzyKP]

Off to a Tigers game today! Hopefully they actually win for a change...

[Ming]

Off to a Tigers game today! Hopefully they actually win for a change...

Congrats on the Victory...

[Guynemer]

It was a near thing, too.

I think maybe last year was just a best-possible-scenario with several guys having career years; that combined with VMart and AJax getting injured, and kerplop.

[OzzyKP]

Yea... I was figuring all along that next year would be our best shot. A full healthy year out of VMart and Prince would make a big difference. Hopefully everyone can stay healthy too.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Talk about Year of the No-Hitter, a combined one this time (due to Millwood getting hurt in the 7th):

http://scores.espn.go.com/mlb/recap?gameId=320608112

[OzzyKP]

Even more interleague intrigue
The 2013 schedule isn't perfect, but it's a huge step in the right direction
Updated: May 19, 2012, 8:16 PM ET
By Jayson Stark | ESPN.com

Year No. 16 of the ever-popular interleague-play era kicks off this weekend. And you'll be shocked to learn that, once again, the 2012 interleague schedule makes less sense than Snooki. For instance:

• In the NL East, the Braves have to play the Yankees six times. But how many times will the Marlins and Phillies play the Yankees? Zero, of course.

• In the AL Central, the Tigers will play half of their 18 interleague games against the Pirates and Rockies. Want to guess how many games the White Sox will play against the Pirates and Rockies? Right you are. That would be none.

• And in the NL Central, the Reds will play nine of their 15 interleague games against the two best teams in the AL Central -- the Indians and Tigers. But the Brewers, naturally, won't play any games against those two teams.

For a decade and a half now, players, managers and general managers have been grumbling about bizarre, illogical interleague schedule glitches like these. And for a decade and a half, those complaints just sailed on out into space like a lost satellite.

Until now.

Coming right up in 2013, those critics will be delighted to know, nearly everything about interleague play is about to change. And that has to be a good thing. Doesn't it?

The impetus for that change will be baseball's most dramatic realignment in history -- a realignment that will break this sport into two leagues with an odd number of teams (15) in each. And that means, for the rest of time -- or at least until some future commissioner has a brighter idea -- that interleague play will no longer be just a three-week subplot in the season.

Starting next year, from Opening Day onward, it's about to become an every-day occurrence. Literally. And that, frankly, has made a lot of people in the sport way more nervous about what's coming than they ought to be.

"I think everyone has questions," Astros manager Brad Mills said this week, "just because it's new and we don't know exactly how it's going to work. We know it means interleague play has to get sprinkled through the season. But everyone's waiting to see how it's going to be sprinkled."

Well, the schedule isn't 100 percent done yet. But our Rumblings detectives have uncovered many of the tentative details for next year's interleague schedule. So here's what you're likely to see:

THE NEW INTERLEAGUE SCHEDULE
• 20 interleague games per team.
• No more than one interleague series per day in April and over the last five weeks.
• No more than one road interleague series per team in the final five weeks.
• Division-by-division matchups rotate annually.
• Every team in a division will play the same five teams in a corresponding division in the other league, plus four "rivalry" games.
• Only four "rivalry" games per team, likely played home-and-home and back-to-back in this format: Monday-Tuesday in one park, Wednesday-Thursday in the other.

The Age of Symmetry

Let's start with the important part:

Now that both leagues are the same size and all six divisions have the same number of teams (five), every team in a division will finally be playing virtually the same interleague schedule as all the other teams in its division.

Unfortunately, we still have to toss in that word, "virtually." But whatever, it'll beat the current madness, anyway.

How will this work? It's very NFL-like, actually. Each division will be lined up against a designated division in the other league on a rotating basis -- and everybody plays everybody.

The tentative plan, for example, is for the AL West to be matched up with the NL Central next year. So all five teams in the AL West would then play all five teams in the NL Central. Period.

No more mixing, matching, picking or choosing, based on TV ratings, marketing strategies or random dart-board throwing. Everybody plays everybody. What a concept.

But that doesn't mean every team plays an "identical" schedule, either. We'll get into why that is momentarily.

20-20 vision

As we reported in our last Rumblings, the most likely plan is for each team to play 20 interleague games a year -- a slight increase from the current system. This season, 20 of the 30 clubs will play 18 interleague games apiece, with the other 10 (all NL teams) playing 15 each. From now on, though, at least every team will play the same number of interleague games. About time.

But how will they parcel out those 20 games? Here's where this gets slightly complicated. We'll again use AL West versus NL Central as an example.

• Each AL West team would play a three-game series against four of the five NL Central teams next year. That comes to 12 games.

• But each team would also play a fifth NL Central team four times -- possibly in a four-game series, possibly home-and-home in a couple of two-game series. That slight variation in each schedule brings the interleague total to 16 games.

• So where would the other four games come from? From "rivalries." Where else? Each team will almost certainly play four "rivalry" games per season, down from the current six. But those would be the only interleague matchups that teams in the same division wouldn't have in common. Again, it isn't perfect. But it's an upgrade over the current absurdity.

Every day is interleague day

You don't need a Ph.D. in scheduling sciences to know that if there's an odd number of teams in each league, there has to be an interleague game pretty much every day of the season. No avoiding that.

But in a sport that insists on playing with two different sets of rules, that raises a potentially biggggg problem that no other sport faces:

Imagine the Red Sox, for instance, being scheduled to finish their season on the road in two National League cities, with no DH allowed. Think David Ortiz might have a few thoughts on that nightmare?

So the schedule architects have set out to design a schedule in which, over the last five weeks of the season, there would be no more than one interleague series at a time -- and no team would have to play more than one interleague series on the road down the stretch. The same concept would be applied in April.

In theory, then, no team would be unduly punished by having to start or finish its season by playing a bunch of games under the other league's rules. The computers are still working through the details. But that seems like the only fair way to go.

Block parties

We've gotten used to having all our interleague games played at the same time in two different scheduling "blocks" -- one in May, the other in June. That, obviously, will no longer be possible.

But if interleague games are going to be kept to a minimum in April and September, that means most of the interleague series will still be held between May and August. And it appears there will still be one, and possibly two "blocks" in which everyone (or just about everyone) is playing interleague games at the same time.

Those blocks just won't last for up to 2½ weeks anymore. A week is more like it. One possibility, in fact, is a version of "Rivalry Week" that would work this way:

Since there will now be four "rivalry" games instead of six, those rivalry series wouldn't be held on weekends anymore. Instead, "Rivalry Week" could feature, say, the Yankees and Mets playing Monday and Tuesday at Citi Field, then Wednesday and Thursday at Yankee Stadium. Sounds like fun to us.

Now are there glitches still remaining in this system? There are. No doubt.

Ten of the 30 teams don't have a true "rival," for one thing. So there's still no avoiding the random match-making that will keep bringing us the magic of Padres-Mariners and Tigers-Pirates every darned year, whether we want it or not.

And we still won't have a schedule in which every team in a division plays an identical schedule to all the other teams in its division -- again, because no one has the courage to kill those interleague rivalry games. (Repeat after us: ka-ching, ka-ching.)

But in the big picture, this is still the most equitable interleague schedule ever devised. It's got rhyme. It's got reason. It's got balance. It's got sanity. So compared to the interleague nuttiness we've learned to tolerate, it's a huge step in the right direction.

http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/page/rumblings120518/mlb-2013-interleague-schedule-huge-step-right-direction

[OzzyKP]

And... some shockingly horrible facts about the Tigers...

The Tigers

It's shocking enough that the Tigers are in third place, five games under .500, six games behind the almost equally shocking first-place White Sox. But a much bigger shock-a-thon lurks just beneath this team's surface. Did you know that …

• Until Thursday, when Miguel Cabrera pulled them even, the Tigers had actually been outhomered (55-54) by the Mariners. Seriously. By the Mariners. All right, so Seattle has played two more games. Whatever. Tell us you predicted this -- and then please rise to hear how much time you're about to serve for perjury.

• The Tigers have had one winning streak of two-plus games since April 18. One. Even the Cubs have had three.

• And finally, there's this: Since their 9-3 start, the Tigers are 17-28. That's the worst record in the American League. The worst. Worse than the Twins. Worse than the A's. Worse than the Mariners. The worst. Unreal.

Yeah, this team is hurting, with Austin Jackson, Alex Avila and Doug Fister on the disabled list. But so is just about every other team in North America.

That isn't enough to explain why "other than Cabrera and Prince [Fielder], they're just not swinging at very many quality pitches," one scout said. And although Jackson's absence has been a big loss, it doesn't totally explain the Tigers' "horrendous" defense, either.

And it certainly doesn't explain why their closer, that thrill-a-minute Jose Valverde, could have had zero blown saves, a 2.24 ERA and a 1.19 WHIP last year -- and now has three blown saves, a 4.24 ERA and a 1.46 WHIP this year.

So did we all totally misjudge this team? Or is this merely a two-month mirage?

"They're a much better team than the way they've played," the scout said. "And injuries have really hurt them. If they get everyone back and … get their offense going again, they can still get hot. But they've got to hit -- because their defense is not good."

http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/page/rumblings120608/five-teams-shocked-most-2012

[SlowwHand]

Avila has struggled all year. I was glad he went on the DL. It took away any reason to keep him.

[OzzyKP]

Well, with all that doom & gloom talk, awesome game on ESPN right now. Tigers came back against Chapman in Cinci. There are so many Detroit fans there they were loudly cheering "Let's Go Tigers" all through the top of the 8th. Lets go Tigers is now trending on Twitter.

[Imran Siddiqui]

http://espn.go.com/mlb/standings

If I don't say it now, I may never be able to say it, but as of 9:30 AM on June 12, 2012, your NL Central leaders are.... The Pittsburgh Pirates!

[Guynemer]

THE MAYANS WERE RIGHT

[SlowwHand]

We Are Family, revisited.

[Demonbinder]

Cubs fire their hitting coach and Theo says he did nothing wrong, but they weren't hitting. He did nothing wrong? How about not doing what they wanted - make sure batters are taking more pitches and not swinging at the first or second pitch all the time. Plus I heard it was the manager that convinced Soriano to switch to a lighter bat and that's why he's been on a tear. Not that it matters for this year, or even next year. But the young kids need to know how to approach the at bat.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Anyone still up - tune in MLB Network or ESPN2 to see the 9th inning of the Giants vs. the Astros coming back (actually first its the bottom of the 8th for the Giants).