Oh Beautiful for Spacious Seating

Today, I took the Shooter Eldest to see the Orioles play the Rangers in Baltimore, as part of a continuing pattern of trying to get her interested in baseball by taking her to different settings for it. The game was marked by a persistent drizzle and an even more persistent sucking by Rangers starting pitcher Vincente Padilla, who Phillies fans will remember for much the same behavior when he was wearing their laundry.

The Rangers are an odd team. You take what appears to be exceptional starting talent -- Ian Kinsler has been one of the best five hitters in the game at second base in the first half, Michael Young can handle the stick, Milton Bradley and Josh Hamilton have been exceptional, etc., etc.... but I'm not sure how good they are, really, because they play in a bandbox. The arms all seem to throw hard, but no one misses bats very much. Defensively, they all seem to move pretty well, but they do seem to make a lot of errors. Managerially, they come from a good Oakland pedigree (Ron Washington and Art Howe), but they do things like leave Padilla out to die in the first game of a three-game set, when you'd think that you'd really want to try harder to take the opener and set the tone for the weekend. Add it all up, and you've got a .500 team that just seems like it's on a treadmill, despite having a lot of nice pieces.

As for the Orioles, it tells you all that you need to know that with a 4:35 start on a Friday July 4, when no one could possibly be working, that the paid attendance was 21,363. With the win, the home team moved to three games above .500, and the visitors to one game above .500. It's hard to imagine either team really staying in the hunt for the playoffs, but something odd has been going on in the AL this year -- exceptional mediocrity. Ten out of 14 teams are above .500, with only the Mariners, Jays, Indians and Royals seriously tanking. (By contrast, six out of 16 in the NL are over .500.)

The change is that the Lords of the AL East aren't crushing the world like they used to, and there hasn't been a breakout team in the Central. This also means that any team that's thinking hard about the wildcard -- or, potentially, making a trade (or not making a move) -- has more to consider. In past years, the wild-card was almost always the AL East runner-up, or maybe a very strong AL West team. Now, it could be anyone, from any direction... which means that a team like Oakland (five out of their division) could be a seller despite only being a couple of games out of the wild-card. With so many contenders, banking on it has become the crapshoot that it's always been in the NL.

A final note on Charm City... independent of my bad feelings about new stadiums, Camden Yards is still a perfect little jewel, and the fact that so many things that it does are now commonplace (i.e., a dedicated little kids area, wide councourses, a standing area in the outfield bleachers, varied concessions, etc.) doesn't make it any less of an accomplishment. The life of MLB fans may be more expensive than it used to be, but it is also definitively better from its stadia, and the Orioles made it happen.