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Seeing as how tonight is Opening Night, I guess it’s pretty important that I spring through the remaining previews.
Luckily, the AL West only has four teams, and only three of them have experienced any intriguing offseason changes.
We’ll start with last year’s division champs:
The Angels had the best regular season in franchise history a year ago, finishing with a 100-62 record and looking in the eyes of many like the favorites to represent the American League in the World Series.
Then they encountered the Boston Red Sox in October, and it was the same old story.
We’ll continue the previews with the AL Central. It’d make sense for me to jump to the NL East from here, what with their games beginning on Sunday night with the Phillies hosting the Braves, but hey, whatever.
Like the last post, the teams will be previewed in order of their appearance in the year-end standings a year ago, with my official predictions coming at the end of the six preview sets.
This will probably not be as exhaustive as the AL East preview, on account of my not being quite as familiar with these teams.
As Opening Day 2009 fast approaches — a little faster than I’d like considering what I’m trying to accomplish here, though I’m more than fine with it otherwise — I thought I’d take a more expansive look at the upcoming Major League Baseball season. For those who don’t care to read my exhaustive rambling, I produced an easy-to-digest version of this all-you-can-eat buffet of baseball-related banality right here.
With that out of the way, let’s not even pretend that I don’t contribute, however little, to the dreaded East Coast Bias.
Yep, it’s AL East time. Teams appear in order of last year’s finish.
The defending American League Champion Rays stunned just about everyone who follows baseball last year (with the possible exception of my friend Brian, who claims that in his sleep-deprived haze during last year’s A’s-Red Sox opener in Japan he had the foresight to tell me that the Rays would win the American League. I was too busy cursing Daisuke Matsuzaka’s constant nibbling and J.D. Drew’s wonky back to notice or care) when they made the leap from perennial punching bag/disgrace to a fairly great team that merely plays in an unspeakably disgraceful venue.
Whereas the question a year ago at this time in the eyes of the people who had given the Rays any respect was if they’d finally manage to win at least 82 games, the question today is can the Rays repeat as champions of the AL East and the American League? The best answer is, they can, but they’re going to need to catch quite a few breaks.
Now that spring training is officially under way, it’s just a matter of time before the baseball season resumes. As always, the season should be a crazy mess filled with drama on and off the field. Titles will be won, players will be suspended, charges will be pressed, A-Rod will do something wacky, it’s like clockwork.
In fact, many of the most surprising and confusing elements of the year in baseball tend to come during the offseason, as teams scramble to improve themselves or, in the case of certain owners, try to become as liquid as possible to become more attractive to potential buyers once it is learned that your ex-wife will be taking you to the cleaners.
It’s often that many of the important developments of the offseason are actually lost in the chaos that surrounds the business of baseball during these months, and fans turn on the TV in March or April to see strange new faces donning the apparel of the team to which they’re most partial to.
For those folks, there are season preview magazines out there that do a pretty good job of catching you up on what transpired while football games were being played. I’ve also noticed that ESPN seems to like to do this “30 Teams in 30 Days” gimmick where they cover a fresh camp each day and report from it. And yeah, that’s great. But for me, it’s a little too time consuming, not to mention how hit-and-miss ESPN’s baseball analysts can be.
So, as a public service, what I’ve decided to do is boil each team’s offseason down into just a few words and post ‘em right here on the blog. I’m so goddamn kind sometimes.
But I’m still a writer at heart, so I needed to come up with a way of consolidating all of this information into small, easy-to-digest chunks. So I gave it a few seconds of thought and decided I’d go the complete hack route and write a single haiku for each team detailing its key offseason machinations. (The lazy, oversimplified 5-7-5 version, natch.) Told you I think like a writer!
So without further ado, I present, after the jump, the preeminent 2009 Major League Baseball Haiku Catch-Me-Up, 30 Teams In 510 Words:
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