WHAT WE HAVE LEARNED THROUGH THE FIRST HALF OF THE BASEBALL SEASON

by WCT, The Ship of Fools

Can you believe the baseball season is already halfway over? I feel like just yesterday I was ignoring the Red Sox and A's as they played a fake-opener in the middle of the night in Japan. Ah, how time flies...

During the dog days of summer, a sports season being half over constitutes news. Much more so than the hourly updates on the activities of a certain third baseman (whether he is doing something really nice for a sick child, or begging out of the HR derby, or banging an 50-year-old pop starlet, do we really need news on him every damn day?) . So with that (and the fact that it is still too early to start writing football preview posts) in mind, lets take a look back at what we have learned from the first three months of the baseball season:

The people running the Florida Marlins are geniuses - Normally, the "geinus" tag in reference to a baseball executive is reserved exclusively for Oakland GM Billy Beane. Well you can have Billy Beane and his zero World Series championships. Give me Marlins President Larry Beinfest. This year, Beinfest has a team that was supposed to be in last place a game and a half out of first. Last year, everyone thought the Fish were having a fire sale when they traded Dontrelle Willis and Miguel Cabrera to Detroit. Now Willis is pitching in single-a ball and Cabrera has the lowest slugging percentage of his life. In '05, Beinfest selected a little-known second baseman that the D-backs had given up on in the rule-5 draft: current stud Dan Uggla. In that same year he traded Mike Lowell and Josh Beckett to the Red Sox for prospects. One of them, Anibal Sanchez, ends up throwing a no-hitter at 22-years old; another, Hanley Ramirez, has developed into the best hitting shortstop in baseball. Granted, the Fish don't pitch very well, but they have already gone through 2 post-championship house-cleanings, and they are back in the race and poised to make a run at a third in the coming years.

The Cleveland Indians need Barry Bonds - As a Tribe fan, it pains me to write that, but its true. This team has some of the best starting pitching in all of baseball (they went like a week without allowing a run!) but they cannot hit. Before he went on the DL, they had a cleanup hitter (Victor Martinez) with no home runs. Before he went on the DL, they had a DH (Travis Hafner) slugging .350 (!) and batting .217(!!). Think about that, a guy in the lineup purely for his bat, and he is batting 50 points below the league average. They could kill two birds with one stone by signing Bonds and making him the DH. I know Barry is a clubhouse cancer, or whatever, but this team is in last place and has only one position player on the roster with a .300+ average as I write this. That player is Sal Fasano. Who is 2 for 6 (.333).

Will the Devil Rays make the playoffs? We shall see... - In May, I was not a believer, and I still feel like the other shoe is going to drop on this team any day now. I mean, one day, they have to wake up and remember that they are the Devil Rays, right? I will concede that they are no longer a 90-loss bottom-feeder, but they have no business with the best record in baseball. They have outscored their opponents by 59 runs thus far. The Red Sox, by comparison, are in second place in the AL East, and have outscored opponents by 69. The Cubs have a run differential of +101! This means that, statistically speaking, their record is inflated, and they are due for a fall. But hell, the D-backs won their division with a run differential of -20 (!!!) last year, so who the hell knows.

The Mets are a 3-ring circus - First, they fire their manager (after telling him he's safe), then the new manager threatens to cut the shortstop, (mind you, not "cut" as in "release from the team," I mean cut. Like, cut with a knife) and calls the fans manure (or fertilizer, or something). They have Jose Reyes showing up Carlos Delgado and pissing everyone off, they have an ancient team that can't stay healthy, and they are still within striking distance of the Phillies in the division, or the NL Wildcard spot. They are a rarely consistent, always entertaining, baseball circus.

The NL West is a Joke (again) - Maybe we didn't learn this, but this seems like a piece of information we re-learn from time to time. Arizona is leading the division at 1 game under .500, and the Dodgers continue to be the kings of throwing money at people and having them underperform spectacularly.