OK, Break's Over, Back To Work

How strange was yesterday? No baseball to speak of at all unless you lucked out and found the Triple-A All-Star Game on TV (International League 7, Pacific Coast League 5). But The Most Boring Day In Sports is now behind us, thank God. So, PLAY BALL!

Best record at the break: Boston Red Sox (53-34)
Worst record at the break: Tampa Bay Devil Rays (34-53)

Interestingly enough, the division leaders haven't been able to put much real estate between them and their opponents so far this season. The Red Sox have the biggest division lead at 10 games. The next largest is Milwaukee in the NL Central, 4 and a half games ahead of the Cubs. The other four divisions are much tighter than that - none of those division leaders are ahead by more than 2 and a half games. If this keeps up, then these division titles won't be decided until late September/early October, which is stressful for the teams but great for the fans.

Here's another attention grabber: The Philadelphia Phillies are about to lose their 10,000th game as a franchise. Right now, they're sitting at 9,999. They aren't playing tonight, but that grand defeat could come as early as tomorrow night when they host the St. Louis Cardinals.

Two other intriguing match-ups this weekend:
Colorado at Milwaukee - the NL West's fourth place Rockies would be in third in the NL Central, but only a half-game behind the Cubs.
Detroit at Seattle - four-game set between one of the best teams in the bigs and the team few people expected to be good out of the AL West.

Speaking of Seattle, did you see Ichiro's inside-the-park home run in the All-Star Game? How friggin' cool was that?! That and the bottom of the ninth made that the most watchable All-Star Game in years. But Paula Cole singing "God Bless America"? Talk about 10 years too late. Between her and Counting Crows (?!) playing at the Home Run Derby, I almost thought I went 10 years back in time or something. Hootie and The Blowfish must've been booked solid this week...

Here's your All-Star Snub: Erik Bedard, starting pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles, leads the majors in strikeouts (149) but wasn't invited to San Francisco. His 3.40 ERA is good for 11th in the AL, just behind Chien-Ming Wang and just ahead of Josh Beckett. Incidentally, fellow Oriole Jeremy Guthrie is second in the AL with a 2.74 ERA. Go figure...

You're a kitty!