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At the beginning of the season, the chic pick to win the AL West was the Seattle Mariners, mainly because of their off-season acquisition of pitcher Cliff Lee, who was outstanding in the post-season for the Phillies last year. Well, Lee is leading his team to the division crown after all, except that team is the Texas Rangers instead of Seattle. The Rangers pulled off a major surprise when they grabbed Lee when all indications were that a trade was minutes away from completion that would’ve sent him to the Yankees. Seattle has long since fallen off the radar screen in the division race, while the young Oakland A’s have kept pace with the other favorite to win the division, the Los Angeles Angels. However, neither the A’s or Angels are close enough to catch Texas, or even be players in the wild card race, especially with the Yanks and Rays running neck and neck in the AL East. The Rangers have an interesting team with some good young players, and the addition of Vladimir Guerrero’s bat in the off-season was a major boost. I don’t like their chances of doing much in the playoffs, however. After Lee, their pitching is suspect. They are going to have to outslug their opponents to win, and in the post-season pitching and defense usually rule and runs are harder to come by. Guerrero would have to come up big and he has never really been a big post-season producer. Adding Lee and Jorge Cantu has helped them rise to the top of the AL West, but unfortunately I think this division is one of baseball’s weakest these days, and I don’t see the Rangers winning in the playoffs, other than the games Lee pitches.

Of all the predictions I posted for the division races in major league baseball back in July, the AL Central has turned out to be the most accurate. The Chicago White Sox, at that point, had battled back after a horrendous start to take the lead in the division. I commended the Sox for salvaging their season but correctly predicted that the Minnesota Twins would eventually win the division. At this point the Twins have a 7 game lead over Chicago and a 14 game edge on the Detroit Tigers, who gave away the division title last season by blowing a lead down the stretch, then losing a one-game playoff to the Twins. The Tigers have the best hitter in the American League in Miguel Cabrera and a host of other young stars, but they are about finished in this race now. The Sox could still make it close, but I believe the Twins will hold on and win it, then enter the post-season in a much better position than they did last year, when having to win the extra playoff game depleted their pitching staff going into a series with the powerful Yankees, who promptly swept them. The Twins are the model for low budget franchises. They are pretty much still doing business just like they did in the 1990s when they won a pair of World Series championships. Back then they had a great front office, the best scouts in baseball and a terrific and very underrated manager in Tom Kelly. They were built around one star player, the late Kirby Puckett, but were a gritty, never-say-die type of team. The Twins of today are following the same game plan – good front office, great scouts, and possibly baseball’s most underrated manager in Ron Gardenhire. They are built around hometown hero and MVP Joe Mauer and are a gritty team that always plays hard. The Twins have it down pat. They run their organization like a college sports program, anticipating when players will leave through free agency and having new players to plug in when they do. This year, they resigned Mauer to a big contract, which has to help the mood in the clubhouse, and sprinkled the roster with just the right amount, and the right type, of veteran players, like Carl Pavano, Jim Thome and Orlando Hudson. The Twins would like nothing better than to get another shot at the Yankees in the playoffs, and they just might get that wish granted.

In an earlier post handicapping the AL East, I named the defending champion New York Yankees as a lock to get into the post-season, and commented on whether the Tampa Bay Rays would be able to hang in with them for the long haul. I also wrote off the Boston Red Sox as having no chance to stay in the race. I still don’t think there is any question that the Yanks will be in post-season play, but they may not win this division. Still, even if they slip up and are overtaken for the division title, in my mind the Yankees are still the favorite to win it all. They have been odds-on favorites to repeat as champs since before the season began, and that was before they added the bats of Lance Berkman and Austin Kearns, and strengthened their bullpen by acquiring Kerry Wood. The Yankees leave no stone unturned when it comes to making sure they are fully equipped to take on all competition, and this season is no exception. So I’m not completely convinced that the Yanks will hold off the Rays, or for that matter even possibly the Red Sox, and win the division, but I am convinced that either way the Bombers will go further in the playoffs than any other AL team. The Red Sox, to their credit, have managed to hang around and stay within a half dozen games or so of the lead. I still feel they will succumb to all the injuries that have plagued them all season and fall short, but there’s no doubt they are a team to be reckoned with and may have a big say in who wins the division even if they don’t. I don’t think there is any doubt that this division, possibly the strongest in baseball now that Buck Showalter has Baltimore playing competitively, will send 2 teams into the playoffs. I’ll stick with my original prediction that those 2 teams will be the New York and Tampa Bay, but not necessarily in that order.