Twistity Sports Exclusive: Baseline Baseball

 
The holiday weekend puts baseball in the spotlight as it rolls toward its All-Star game on July 14 in Minneapolis. Maybe the spotlight is not the best idea. This has not been a season of spectacular highs.

As of Thursday, there was only one team in MLB with a winning percentage above .600. That would be the Oakland Athletics, who are nearly invisible to their home audience and hardly a national brand except for popularizing Moneyball, the economic theory of building on the cheap.

They’ve assembled a cast of oddball outcasts and they’re fun to watch, though East Coast fans rarely get to see them. The home stadium is such a pit that the locals refuse to turn out.

A preseason favorite for the World Series, the Washington Nationals have struggled in the mediocre NL East. Now Bryce Harper, who has somehow managed to play in all of 25 games but has all the answers, is ripping manager Matt Williams over the lineup and who plays where. That led former Nat Mark DeRosa, now an analyst for MLB Network, to offer this suggestion to Harper via the Washington Post: “He needs to keep his mouth shut. … A 21-year-old kid popping off like this? He doesn’t realize its impact. Just shut up and play the game.” That’s what passes for civil discourse in your nation’s capital these days.

Neither the Boston Red Sox nor New York Yankees show much life, with both below .500 (and their games against each other, relentlessly televised by ESPN, still taking about 500 hours each, turned to sludge by 500 pitching changes, mostly by the Yankees). That leaves the AL East in the hands of the Toronto Blue Jays. Oh, Canada! No, Canada! It’s rare that a defending World Series champion struggles the way the Red Sox have. The St. Louis Cardinals, the World Series runner-up, are a mere four games over .500 and in third place in the NL Central.

The Los Angeles Dodgers underperform their talent level, which may be a blessing as they’re almost not seen at all on television in their home market, thanks (???) to a new cable channel that few systems carry. The Colorado Rockies proudly display baseball’s leading hitter (Troy Tulowitzki, .353) but they’re 13 games out in the NL West and 12 games under .500.

Low scoring is once again baseball’s norm, with pitchers dominating. True story – a club in South Florida arranged for a group package of tickets to a Miami Marlins game. One member elected at the last minute not to go, choosing to stay home and watch a World Cup game. His disappointed friend said, ‘You’re going to stay home and watch a game where nobody scores?’ The soccer match ended 1-0. The Marlins lost 1-0. Hmm, long games, low scores. Is this the new American dream?
 
 
Post By: Larry Weisman, a longtime sportswriter for USA TODAY, blogs for Twistity.com. Follow him on Twitter @MrLarryWeisman .