MLB Wrap Up With Week 5 Supercontest

Super blog! Ill give you guys a rundown of how well I predicted the baseball season. Below is each team as they appear in the final standings with my predicted record in parentheses. If you don’t care then jump on down to this week’s Supercontest recap and picks!

AL WEST

Oakland A's 94-68 (77-85)

Texas Rangers 93-69 (98-64)
Anaheim Angels 89-73 (96-66)
Seattle 75-87 (69-93)

Obviously no one picked the A’s to win the west with the two time defending champs Rangers team and a completely reloaded Angels team sitting in the same division, but I will take credit for predicting a much better season for the A’s than most. As predicted the offense was better than last year and while I though McCarthy and Parker would help offset the loss of Gio Gonzalez and Trevor Cahill (who really wasn’t that good last year) what obviously set this team over the edge was performances by 30 other rookies that simply blew apart all statistical projections for players like Brandon Moss, Tommy Milone, and even players like Josh Donaldson (who I watched in Sacramento last year and though he had a bench future ahead). I’m not sure what I’m going to do with this team next year but among sabermetricians they are a likely Top 3 regression candidate. Who knows, maybe the kids are just that good.

For Texas this was a good lesson for both the players and the fans. Divisions are hard to win. Every game matters. Never assume anything. Texas made it easy to assume a division by compiling a rather large division lead for much of the season only to piss it away with a 4-9 stretch at the end of the season. Now they have to set out to do what the Cardinals did last year, take it from the wild card to the championship. There is still a lot of talent and a bunch of postseason experience on the roster. It’s hard to have a lot of expectations for this team right now, but with a possible three straight home games to start the postseason they could build up for a run.

Anaheim has to be the most disappointing team of the season. They basically killed themselves in April and couldn’t play enough catchup the rest of the way. What is doubling disappointing is that they may just be the scariest team right now and have nothing to play for. At least Mike Trout made them a whoel bunch of money to pay that albatross Pujols contract.

Seattle made some nice strides, turning this into possibly the toughest division from top to bottom in all of baseball. The problem here is they just still lack enough rotation depth and offensive talent to compete in the AL. Selling King Felix for a king’s ransom may be the best possible route to get this team moving in the next couple of years.

AL CENTRAL

Detroit Tigers 88-74 (101-61)
Chicago White Sox 85-77  (81-81)
Kansas City Royals 72-90 (75-87)
Cleveland Indians 68-94 (72-90)

Minnesota Twins 66-96 (80-82)

Detroit sure made it interesting. I don’t think this team is as scary as people think they are heading into the postseason and there is a significant chance they get run right out by the A’s. The Tigers ended their schedule in similar fashion to the Giants: A month’s worth of easy pickings in the division. Verlander and Scherzer are capable postseason pitchers but that bullpen and offense outside of Cabrera and Fielder  (and maybe Austin Jackson) simply hasn’t been great all season.  But they did win the easiest division in baseball just not in the dominating fashion I, and many others, expected.

Chicago was shockingly more talented this season than I predicted, yet still only outpaced my predictions by 4 games thanks to a horrible September. It’s amazing what 3 players can do for you and Chris Sale, Adam Dunn’s revived zombie corpse, and the everlasting AJ Pierzynski made all the difference for the White Sox in the first 5 months of the season. They have enough talent to maintain a strangle hold on second, but as constituted this division should continue to be Detroit’s for a few more years.

Kansas City was about expected. There just isn’t much to say about them. A lot of young talent on offense, some of which still has to grow and some of which has grown, but until they get a couple half decent starters in there, they will continue to disappoint.

Cleveland showed us their true colors. I’m glad I was a smart cookie and picked them fourth in this division.  There just is simply no talent on this team. Jimenez is a joke and Santana and Choo, while nice players are not franchise carriers. But really, that rotation has to improve. When Justin Masterson is your statistical leader in wins (11), ERA (4.93), K (153), and WHIP (1.45) you have problems, man.

I guess I overvalued the return of Mauer, Morneau, and Span to this offense and failed to consider that the Twins rotation also sucks. Even with more offense in Josh Willingham they sucked bad. These last three teams are terrible pitching wise and only Kansas City even comes close to carrying an offense to counteract those problems. I need to make sure I remember this heading into next year.

AL EAST

New York Yankees 95-67 (96-66)
Baltimore Orioles 93-69 (69-93)

Tampa Bay Rays 90-72 (93-69)
Toronto Blue Jays 73-89 (84-78)
Boston Valentines 69-93 (90-72)

Surprise, surprise the Yankees win. I thought it would be close, but it wasn’t quite close with the team I expected. Still at this point, until the Yankees collapse, picking them as division winners is easy money. Despite injuries to ARod, Teixeira, and CC (twice), the Yankees just kept coming. I look forward to hopefully beating them out of the playoffs again.

The fighting Showalters! Ok this is obviously the top pick for regression next year with that negative run differential. Adam Jones finally broke out. He needs to be a lesson to everyone that until a guy really gets to 27 or 28 you cant throw him out. Baseball is a funny game like that. It’s like being a quarterback in football, there is so much to learn at the highest level about your offensive approach that it can take years. Also kudos to Chris Davis (age 26) for finally figuring it out too. His 33 home runs would have been useful at first base for the Rangers this year. I wouldn’t have high hopes if I was an Orioles fan, especially after getting beat down by a good pitching staff. They remind me of the Rangers of the late 90s that just had so much offense and not enough pitching they could win big or lose big. 

Tampa Bay reaches about the same levels of disappointment as the Angels. Clearly the AL’s best rotation was not enough to make up for Evan Longoria’s absence as the offense struggled mightily at times. They almost came back but it just wasn’t enough this year. I just don’t know where they go from here. They probably won’t retain Upton, who was their best run producer while Longoria was out and don’t have the cash to make any big splashes anywhere. That awesome rotation is getting wasted by penny pinching owners in Tampa.

Man, I told you guys Toronto wasn’t that good. In hindsight the 84 wins was too high for this team. Of course losing Bautista  for an extended period of time didn’t help but Edwin ENcarnacion did have a career year. For Toronto its like Seattle, some talent in places, but just lesser talent than its division rivals. Its rotation cant compete with the Rays and its offense cant compete with the Yankees. Just no way they do anything in this division.

Sigh, I thought talent would win out at the end of the day over the Bobby Valentine sideshow. Now that talent is pushed out of Boston along with Bobby V. All of it just smacks of a throwaway year from the outset in Boston. Is the team positioning itself to sell? Do they want to make a run at Upton and Hamilton? What about Greinke? Or do they play the developmental game next season? I don’t envy Red Sox fans right now. The team is a mess and it might get messier before it gets better.

NL WEST

San Francisco Giants 94-68 (92-70)
Los Angeles Dodgers 86-76 (81-81)
Arizona Diamondbacks 81-81 (86-76)
San Diego Padres 76-86 (70-92)

Colorado Rockies 64-98 (75-87)

I think someone commented on this prediction that the Giants wouldn’t win the West by 6 games. Instead they went and won it by 8. I wasn’t confident in the talent of this division outside of the Giants. Despite Lincecum’s well chronicled struggles, the Giants still have 2 of the best pitchers in the league in MadBum and Cain. The addition of the Cheater, Angel Pagan, and a full season of Posey was more than enough to improve the offense from last year and give this division easily to the Giants.

LA was a first half dynamo, yet somehow after all of their deadline deals and the post deadline monster trade they seemed to regress. Despite being in a division with the Giants, the Dodgers actually gave up the fewest runs in the division. I would’ve thought with the addition of HanRam and Adrian Gonzalez to a healed Matt Kemp in the second half would make that offense formidable. But while each player played ok, they weren’t enough and the Dodgers faded bad in September. This will be an intriguing team come next season.

Arizona was off the radar all season. Regression in the pitching staff and a horrible by his standards season from Justin Upton didn’t help. They did put up the offense expected in the desert but they just couldn’t find the consistency to push for the division or even a wild card. Turns out the predicted 86 wins wouldn’t have made the wild card anyway.

San Diego made some nice strides with young talent this year and now that the sale is complete San Diego may be in a position to compete going forward. The story was obviously the emergence of Chase Headley who posted an out of nowhere .286/.376/.498 line with 31 homers and 115 RBI. Chase turned 28 this year after losing much of his Age 27 season to injury and inconsistency. Another lesson in giving prospects a chance. Not every player can be Mike Trout.

Colorado gave up 890 runs. That’s 5.5 every game. In the National League. Not going to win much doing that and they certainly did not win much posting the 3^rd worse record in the league.

NL CENTRAL

Cincinnati Reds 97-65 (82-80)
St. Louis Cardinals 88-74 (83-79)
Milwaukee Brewers 83-79 (87-75)
Pittsburgh Pirates 79-83 (79-83)
Chicago Cubs 61-101 (71-91)
Houston Astros 55-107 (58-104)

Swap the Reds and Brewers and I nailed this division. So I didn’t give Latos enough credit, but what really did this was Johnny Cueto’s Cy Young winning season (yep he’s my pick) and the arrival of Aroldis Chapman. If you can get quality pitching in Cincinnati that powerful offense led by Votto (who was hurt), Bruce, and Phillips can give yout he support. They got the pitching this year and so it’s nto a surprise they won the Central handily. I just didn’t believe they’d get such great pitching.

Stupid Cardinals won’t die. Pujols leaves, Carpenter is lost and they keep on trucking. That’s how bad the National League is. If you put the Cardinals in the American League they’d get blown out. Beltran did do enough to help counteract the loss of Pujols and the rest of the offense held its end of the bargain finishing top 10 in Runs, BA, OBP, and SLG. I still think they have a very short future in this postseason and expect regression next season.

The Brewers turned it on way too late. Aramis Ramirez was plenty good in place of Prince Fielder and Ryan Braun was maybe even better than last season. With Greinke and Gallardo in the fold there was no reason these guys should have been so bad as to have to sell Greinke. Even 5 of their 6 primary starters stayed under 4.00 era but they just couldn’t do it. I still can’t figure it out.

The Pirates need more seasoning…again. Two seasons in a row they’ve collapsed in the second half. Andrew McCutchen is everything he’s ever going to be and Pedro Alvarez and Neil Walker and Garrett Jones all held up their end of the bargain too. The pitching staff just melted away there in the second half and the offense couldn’t keep hot. Pittsburgh will have it’s first winning season in 20 years next year.

Cubs and Astros suck. Cubs will be rebuilding for years and the Astros should be contracted. Whatever, welcome to the AL West, Houston. We’ll make you feel right at home.

NL EAST

Washington Nationals 98-64 (95-67)
Atlanta Braves 94-68 (85-75)
Philadelphia Phillies 81-81 (90-72)
NY Mets 74-88 (75-87)

Miami Marlins 69-93 (77-85)

Freakin’ nailed it. Strasburg is an otherworldly talent that now has performance enhancing surgery behind him. The totally expected and predicted seasons of Jordan Zimmermann and Gio Gonzalez made this easily the most formidable team in NL. They already had the bats once Michael Morse got off the DL and Jayson Werth had a bounceback campaign. What I don’t understand is why this wasn’t more predictable in the first place. All the pieces were there, and the opportunity was there as well with the Phillies sitting in neutral while they waited for Utley and Howard to comeback. These guys are my pride and joy of my predictions and if something befalls my beloved Rangers in the postseason, I’m riding the Nationals!

Atlanta’s young guns did it. I questioned whether they would be able to, and Heyward and Medlen and Venters and Kimbrel and Freeman all stepped up. Even the old guy Chipper stepped up. This is a dangerous team and it was nice to see them bounce back after an epic collapse last year at the end.

Philadelphia regressed faster than expected. Maybe I should’ve seen it coming, but they did still have players like Rollins and Victorino and Pence in their lineups while they waited. I thought they would start slow but not this slow. I’ll be curious to see what this team does going forward. Halladay and Lee aren’t getting any younger and the Four Horseman went to the Big Three that may just end up being lonely one in Hamels soon. Tough transition time for the Phillies after a great half decade run.

I didn’t factor Dickey in as a 50 game winner when I gave the Mets 75 wins and they still couldn’t get there. The Mets just suck. Johan Santana was a nice story for 1/3 of the year until his 134 pitch no-hitter on June 1. After that he made only 10 more starts with only 3 of them even being quality. What got me more I guess was I overestimated their offense. It’s pretty much a no name offense. I’ll have to keep that in mind for next year.

If I was a Marlins fan I’d want a divorce. New stadium, new manager, new pitcher, and new All-Star position players and they can’t win 70. Granted I didn’t think thye would be any good, since when are Jose Reyes and Mark Buerhle difference makers in a tough division? Giancarlo Stanton is a nice player, but HanRam wasn’t doing anything for this team and the rest of the offense played a pop-gun style with the highest home run total behind Stanton was Ramirez’ 14. Get this team some real bats with some power.

All in all I think I did fairly well in my predictions. I’ll certainly put them up against any “expert” who gets paid to do this shit and I didn’t need any crazy sabermetric predictive models to do it either. Sometimes all of that gets in the way of common-sense and observation. I like sabermetrics, but this column was certainly one for the old-timers.

SUPERCONTEST RECAP AND PICKS

Before I get started I could’ve won some serious money for a lot of people last week. In addition to these five picks which I nailed, I gave out 6 of my best college football picks to a friend in Vegas (that he failed to bet) and nailed all 6 of those. Will I ever see a weekend like that again? One can only hope. On to the recaps:

Patriots (-4) @ Bills

This pick was looking dicey for awhile until Tom Brady and Co. went into eff-you mode and just started slinging it  including a fantasy game changing (for me at least) garbage time 25 yard TD to Brandon Lloyd when they were already up 14 with 4 minutes to go. It’s clear neither of these teams have good defenses, but at least the Patriots showed resiliency once the offense started to charge back and made a series of stops in the second half. Against any team with a half-competent offense it may be difficult for the Patriots to cover higher spreads like 6+ until the back-end of that defense gets it together.

49ers (-4) @ Jets

Crushed. Until further notice, I will not expect the 49ers to lose to teams with minimal talent on offense. It was clear from Minnesota’s first two games that they can at least move the ball, but coming into this game Sanchez couldn‘t complete 50% of his passes.   Add in a scheme ruining injury to Revis, the fact that Harbaugh is certainly a top 5 NFL coach, that the 49ers had an inspiring week of practice in Youngstown and the blowout shutout was fairly predictable.

Giants (+2.5) @ Eagles

This got close towards the end. The Eagles offense is miserable, I’m shocked they were able to win this game. They have to be the shakiest 3-1 team in all the NFL. If they can’t get McCoy going, this team could put together a significant losing streak.  Meanwhile the Giants couldn’t seem to get much going either, but that was to be expected against Philly’s stout defense. Really if you have two even teams who know each other better than anyone, taking the points seems to always be a good bet.

Vikings (+6.5) @ Lions

Didn’t quite win this one how I planned, but one thing is for certain, I hate the Lions offense. I still have no idea how they came back last week, but this offense is just not clicking nearly on the same level as the Jets. Teams shouldn’t be able to roll double coverage or zones to one player every play without paying the price somewhere else but that’s what’s happening with Megatron and Detroit’s offense. Meanwhile, Minnesota was a big let down on offense too, being unable to channel its efficiency from the last 3 weeks and failing to score a touchdown against the maligned Lions defense. It may be too early to call Minnesota a good team, but they certainly are a competitive team.

Bengals (-2.5) @ Jaguars

Glad I went with my gut here, Cincinnati’s offense is decent enough to cover this spread even with a bad defense. Jacksonville still lacks a lot of offensive firepower and I wouldn’t call their defense dominant either. Still, this game shouldn’t sucker people into thinking Cincinnati is somehow great and Jacksonville terrible, I can still see Jacksonville being competitively bad in a lot of games.

WEEK 5 PICKS

Falcons (-3) @ Redskins

So I didn’t hype up the -7 line against Carolina at home last week for a couple of reasons. One, Carolina was not that bad as they showed on Thursday night. That game is just an anomaly. One team seems to come into it completely unprepared (see: Cardinals, Arizona). The other thing is I’m not sold on the Falcons defense being that great. Combine those two factors plus it being a division game and that’s why I stayed away. This line seems ridiculously reactionary to both RGIII’s heroics and the Falcons nearly taking a shit at home against Carolina. But the Redskins secondary is so bad that I just can’t help picturing Atlanta going up and down the field on them all game. Even if RGIII can keep pace, I think Atlanta can cover the 3 in a shootout. With me avoiding the Thursday game and 4 teams on bye, this seems as much of a lock as any pick can be this week.

Texans (-8) @ Jets

I don’t usually like these lines, more than a touchdown on Monday Night Football on the road. But the Jets simply have the most inept offense right now and the Texans defense is every bit as capable as the 49ers defense of pitching the shutout here. With the exception of Peyton Manning, this defense has just taken charge and run through everyone. I’m surprised this line isn’t higher. The Jets run defense is secretly not good and without Revis the pass defense is all screwed up. This game just smacks of 20-3. Besides as a friend told me, “I’m riding the Texans until they lose”. This seems like a good week to do it.

Ravens (-5) @ Chiefs

Arrowhead…blah blah blah…7 pt victory over the Browns blah blah blah…Look I clearly made a mistake on the Chiefs calling them division winners. That defense has been a total failure and the only team they’ve beaten is the hexed Saints. It’s nice Jamaal Charles is back and I know Baltimore  has also had a sneaky bad run defense but still the Chargers went into Kansas City and won by 17. The Ravens had ten days to prepare and I think they do this. You just worry about another, pull out just enough to win game like they had against Cleveland but it’s tough to factor that into play.

Packers (-7) @ Colts

I don’t really like this line but when 6 teams are out of consideration you have to start picking some tough lines. The Packers just simply haven’t looked great for 3 out of 4 weeks and the one week they looked great was skewed by it being a Thursday game. Even when people said well just wait for the Saints since they’ve played 3 good defenses, they didn’t look great. But I think we are getting a speed offense on turf against a team that hasn’t seen an offense of this caliber yet. While it also feels like bad karma to take advantage of a situation like this, Chuck Pagano, head coach of the Colts is out with leukemia. That’s not something that a team rebounds from quickly. I know they had the bye week but I just get the feeling the Colts might be seriously flat this game.

Chargers (+3.5) @ Saints

This is stupid. The Saints just can’t stop anyone when it counts. It’s not like I like the Chargers, but I am out on the Saints giving points until they can show they can win. After all they couldnt hold an 18 point lead against the Chiefs for crying out loud.

BONUS

Eagles (+3.5) @ Steelers

I hate the Steelers. I just don’t think they are any good. Of course I don’t trust the Eagles but they were just competent enough to beat the Giants which is a better team than both these teams. When I hate two teams, it’s never a bad option to take the points. I just happened to like the Chargers against the Saints while also getting the same points.

Last week: 5-0, Season: 10-5 (11-6 with bonus