June 1st Baseball Talk

Well June is here once again so fire up your grills, hit the beach and start enjoying that warm weather. OK, temperatures are slowly rising at least in the Midwest so one of these days summer weather will show up, right? Regardless of the weather, June is the month in MLB when teams begin to separate themselves from the pack and you find out who the good teams are from the pretenders. Since today is the first day of June and the Pens lost last night, I can't think of a better time, than right now, to talk some baseball.

The Rays - The sun might not be shining bright in the northern part of the country, but the Rays are shining in Tampa, Florida. The Rays currently are 34-22, own the best record in the American League and are one game ahead of the Red Sox in the AL East. While I still think the Red Sox will end up winning this division, don't expect the Rays to fall much behind. Boston are the champs and still have enough talent and pitching to take over the division and be the favorite heading into October. But expect the Rays to be around all summer and compete for a wild card berth in the AL. Everybody knew about Tampa Bay's young hitting prospects coming into the season with BJ Upton, Carl Crawford and Evan Longoria, but the Rays are winning because of their pitching and defense. They are currently fifth in the AL in ERA with a 3.67 mark and have tossed seven shutouts in two months. The Rays also have the league's top fielding percentage (.989) and have the fewest errors with 23 in 56 games. Baseball is a simple game sometimes, you are going to win plenty of games if you are pitching and playing stellar defense. Don't expect this team to fade out of contention anytime soon.

Detroit Tigers - I'm burying this team for the 2008 season. Look, I live in the Detroit TV/media market so I get to watch the Tigers more than any other team. And yes, they are just 7.0 games out of first in the AL Central, yes there's plenty of time left in the season and yes they have an unbelievable lineup on paper, but hold on a second. This team has too many problems to dig themselves out of a 23-32 hole. Take for instance their AL-worst team ERA. Their bullpen is a mess with no one to go to when they are in a close game. And the stacked lineup will put up 10 runs one game and then get shutout the next two. The lineup people were talking about putting up 1,000 runs during spring training has surprisingly been shutout nine times. NINE times in two months! Forget about it. The Tigers hitters have been way too inconsistent to expect to compete.

NL East - I see this division coming down to the wire again this season, but the Marlins won't be there come September. The Mets will get it going over the next couple of months and the Braves are looking like the same well-constructed team that won 15 straight division titles. I think it will come down to the Mets and Braves with the Phillies not far off, but the Marlins will fade soon. Florida has been knocking the ball out of the yard this year, ranking second in the NL in homers, but their average is middle of the road and they aren't getting great pitching with a 4.38 ERA. The pitching will catch up to the Fish and they will fall behind the more experienced and talented Mets and Braves. I'll take the Mets to win the division with a real good chance that the wild card will come from this division in either the Braves or Phillies.

Pirates are 26-29. Will they finish with a winning season? Nope, absolutely not. Somehow this team is 26-29. I don't understand that, but their division is too talented for the Pirates to get past any of them. The Pirates have an ERA of 5.00 and the starting pitching has been atrocious with Phil Dumatrait suddenly becoming their most consistent pitcher. The Bucs two young starters that were supposed to carry them this year have been the worst two on the team...Ian Snell has been awful, same with Tom Gorzelanny plus he's hurt thanks to Jim Tracy. They are toward the bottom of the National League in hitting, second-worst in ERA and are dead last in fielding. The Reds, Brewers, Cubs, Cardinals and Astros all have more talent than the Pirates so they will be losing their 16th consecutive season.

Teams to watch for over the next couple of months to start making a run: Indians, Brewers, Rangers and Blue Jays.

Nothing's Gonna Change My World

There were plenty of funny, idiotic and crazy news happenings this week and I figured to discuss a couple of them at The Wheelhouse.

Did you hear about this news? NASA is planning on beaming a Beatles song into outer space Monday. The Beatles' song Across the Universe (fitting) will head into outer space at 7 PM Eastern Time on Monday and will be aimed at the North Star, Polaris, which is a short 431 light years away from Earth and won't reach Polaris for a long time. I can't stress enough how stupid this is. They don't mention the numbers in any of these articles, but my guess is beaming sounds into outer space and perfectly aiming it to a point in the sky isn't exactly the same price as a happy meal at McDonalds. Why is NASA wasting time and money on this? Instead, why don't they focus their time to answer questions like life of Mars or if an asteroid is barreling toward us.

Happy Groundhog's Day! Today in the small (and I stress small) town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania everybody's lovable groundhog, Phil, was pulled out of his hole to forecast the weather. And as usual Phil saw his shadow again, leading to six more weeks of winter. A record crowd of more than 30,000 people gathered at Gobler's Knob to see Phil this year with Feb. 2nd falling on a weekend. We at The Wheelhouse used to make the small trek from our hometown to Punxy every year to celebrate the festivities during the simpler times of our college days, but like everything else, jobs and our lives got in the way this year.

Terrelle Pryor is milking his college decision for everything it's worth. Pryor, the number one prospect coming out of high school this year, is down to about four schools on his list of who to sign with and play football for. I don't like to rave about what athletes did in high school because mostly it's against joke competition, but coming out of Jeanette High School outside of Pittsburgh, Pryor had a ridiculous career (only player in PA history to run for 4,000 yards and throw for 4,000 yards) while leading his team to the state championship his senior year by mercy-ruling teams the entire way. The NCAA national letter of intent day is February 6th and according to an article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pryor was going to announce his decision live on ESPN, but now might hold off on his decision for a while due to a possible visit to Oregon next week. Michigan and Ohio State are still the two main frontrunners for Pryor, but Oregon and Penn State are still in running though he had this to say about Happy Valley last week, "I just don't know about the area up there. I don't know if I'd like being in that kind of area." Uh, hey Terrelle...you don't like State College? Have you been to Columbus?

The Super Bowl is tomorrow. I will admit that I have watched zero minutes of analysis, highlights and pre-game hoopla from ESPN the past two weeks because it's all a circus and I just want the game to start. So on the eve of Super Bowl XLII a report is released that claims a Patriots employee taped the Rams walkthrough the day before Super Bowl XXXVI. That was the Super Bowl where the Pats were heavy underdogs and then came out and shocked the Rams for their first championship. Now the report is missing certain details at this time and the NFL is looking into it, but there's no doubt in my mind that this is true. The Pats were caught doing this in Week 1 of this season and punished by the NFL, but it's naive to think they haven't done it in other years. The media needs to stop downplaying spygate and finally admit that some of their Super Bowl titles (if not all) might not be legit as we all think. In a three-point game against the Rams in SB XXXVI, you think having the other teams' plays and signals wouldn't make a difference? Please. Hopefully the NFL investigates and gets to the bottom of this. If anything it's another cloud that hovers over Belichick and Patriots as they go for 19-0 tomorrow in Arizona.