Monthly Archives: April 2016

MLB 2016 – National League Preview

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MlbHlSqAfter looking at the American League yesterday, our attention now turns to the Senior Circuit.

The most significant difference between the two leagues coming into the 2016 season is that whilst every team in the AL at least has some chance – however small – of competing for a Wild Card place, 5 of the 15 teams in the National League are deliberately looking towards future seasons.

‘Tanking’ is the word people like to use, essentially where a team deliberately trades away its best players, slashes the payroll and prioritizes the acquisition and development of prospects over challenging for a play-off spot. It’s controversial given the amount of TV money these teams are banking – under the assumption that they would be fielding a team worth watching – yet the truth is the current MLB landscape doesn’t just allow teams to do this, it rewards them for it.

Nothing illustrates that better than the 2015 seasons had by the Chicago Cubs and the Houston Astros.

The Atlanta Braves, Cincinnati Reds, Colorado Rockies, Milwaukee Brewers and Philadelphia Phillies are all prepared to take some pain today for jam tomorrow.

The good news is that there are plenty of strong teams left in the NL to create a captivating regular season.

NL East

This time last year many onlookers had penciled-in the Washington Nationals as not only the team to beat in the NL East, but the team to beat across the whole league. They had won 96 games in 2014 and responded to an early play-off exit by signing ace pitcher Max Scherzer, so the hype was not unwarranted; however it was something the team singularly failed to live up to and ultimately cost manager Matt Williams his job.

In 2016 it’s the New York Mets who are receiving the same platitudes, yet it seems highly unlikely that they will buckle under the weight of expectations. Their young pitching staff is genuinely outstanding and, having unexpectedly made the World Series last season, figure to only get better in 2016. That’s a scary thought for everyone else.

Where does that leave the Nationals? The one true success of 2015 for them was the MVP season put together by Bryce Harper and just as you can count on the likes of Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard to pitch like aces for the Mets, so you can expect Harper to do the near-impossible and challenge Mike Trout for the honour of the best player in MLB.

The experienced Dusty Baker has been brought in to pull the team together and create a happy ship out of what was a combustible crew. Whether they will challenge the Mets, or at least win a Wild Card spot, will come down to good health and how effectively they take advantage of the 38 games that they will play combined against the rebuilding Braves and Phillies.

NL Central

It’s been an off-season diet of the Cubs, Cubs and more Cubs in the NL Central. Joe Maddon and his team are the new media darlings and you can understand why. They’ve amassed an enviable group of young talent and supplemented it with free agent signings in the form of Jon Lester in the 2014/15 off-season and now again with Jason Heyward, Ben Zobrist and John Lackey.

They were really good in 2015 and will be again in 2016.

What we shouldn’t lose sight of, though, is that the Pittsburgh Pirates were just as good last season and the St Louis Cardinals were even better. Neither team has added the experienced talent that the Cubs have acquired, and Chicago’s gain has very directly been St Louis’s loss with Heyward and Lackey moving to the other side of that rivalry, but they still have strong rosters and the way things are shaping up could really suit them.

The Cubs are the team with all the expectations. It’s been very noticeable in Spring Training that the Cardinals are almost enjoying the way everyone is jumping on the Chicago bandwagon, ready to prove exactly why they’ve won the division for the past three seasons and have no intention of letting the upstarts crash their party.

As for the Pirates, you’ll struggle to find a team more determined to win a division having experienced the pain of a one-game-and-gone play-off exit in each of the past two seasons.  This is going to be a true three-way battle.

NL West

Will there be a three-way battle in the West?

The Arizona Diamondbacks are intent on making that so. Their audacious signing of Zack Greinke mirrored the Cubs’ Cardinal clear-out job by taking him away from the LA Dodgers, with the added benefit that the San Francisco Giants lusted after the free agent too. They followed that up by trading for Shelby Miller and whilst the package they gave up for him may prove to be a high price to pay, it’s given them a front three with Patrick Corbin that stacks up well against their division rivals.

The D-Backs are confident, although it’s often been the case that the team that ‘won the off-season’ in recent years has gone on to win precious little else. What Arizona needed was for their existing players to either repeat or improve on their previous performances to make the additions count. That hope took a hammer blow last night with outfielder A.J. Pollock breaking his elbow. Pollock quietly developed into one of the best players in the National League last year. He will be out for an extended period – a similar injury cost him the entire 2010 season – and whilst it’s not fatal for the D-Backs’ chances, it certainly reduces them.

Injuries are also the story in LA where the Dodgers have been devastated by a succession of setbacks. At time of writing, MLB.com’s injury report lists no fewer than 13 Dodgers suffering notable ailments with as many as 10 of them being a doubt for Opening Day, if not out of action for much longer. They’re Major League-leading payroll ensures that sympathy will be in short supply and the Dodgers still have a solid group to compete with. As players return to health during the season, alongside the always-present potential for them to acquire new players and to up the payroll even further, you would be wrong to write them off even if they are in third place by the end of May.

As for the Giants, they’ve added starting pitchers Johnny Cueto and Jeff Samardzija to their rotation and it’s an even year, so the omens are good for them.

My predictions

NL East – NY Mets, Washington, Miami, Philadelphia, Atlanta

NL Central – St Louis, Chicago Cubs (WC), Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Milwaukee

NL West – LA Dodgers, San Francisco (WC), Arizona, San Diego, Colorado

MLB 2016 – American League Preview

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MlbHlSqA new baseball season always creates plenty of excitement, yet 2016 promises to be something a bit special.

There are so many great potential story lines – a part of so many teams that potentially could make it to the play-offs – that it’s difficult to know where to begin in rounding them up.

That’s especially the case in the American League.

Whilst there are teams that likely will be out of the play-off conversation when September comes around (to my reckoning: Baltimore, Chicago White Sox, Minnesota, Oakland and Tampa Bay), none of them are punting on the season and it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that one of them could still be in with a sniff if things go their way.

You can put together realistic scenarios for most of the teams to at least have a shot at the Wild Card. Here are a couple of the main stories in the three AL divisions alongside my predictions (i.e. somewhat educated guesses) as to who will finish where.

AL East

The Toronto Blue Jays clearly had a good team last year and the logic of them winning the AL East division in 2015 made many overlook that this was a club that hadn’t made it to the play-offs since their back-to-back World Series triumphs in 1992 and 1993.

It was a tremendous achievement for John Gibbons and his men and they will hope that having taken that leap they are set for a period of success; however, there’s a shadow hanging over the club that may call that into question. Sluggers Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion are both out of contract at the end of the season and neither have signed an extension as yet, with their own self-imposed ‘start of season’ deadlines about to expire. If that doesn’t change in the next few days, the possibility that two of their core players could both be leaving at the end of the season will add an extra dimension to their campaign.

The Boston Red Sox know that this will be David Ortiz‘s last season as he is set to retire and they will want him to go out on a high note. They’re an interesting team this year. The starting rotation includes plenty of question marks after the newly-recruited ace David Price, but from there this is a roster that should be competing at the sharp end. The thing is, you could have said the same before the 2014 and 2015 seasons and in both cases they didn’t just miss out on the play-offs, they finished dead last in the division. David Ortiz’s send-off is far from the only reason that 2016 has to be different.

AL Central

The projection systems have written off the Kansas City Royals yet again despite back-to-back World Series appearances and capturing the ultimate prize last year.

The Royals are not an extravagantly talented team loaded with stars and instead very admirably have found ways to work around their limitations to be more than the sum of their parts. Their Opening Day starting rotation of Edinson Volquez, Ian Kennedy, Yordano Ventura, Chris Young and Kris Medlen looks underwhelming, for example, but they’re an excellent fielding side and if they can hand over the game to their bullpen with a lead then that’s normally good enough to win the game. Doubting their ability to make it three Fall Classic appearances in a row isn’t unjust; however you shouldn’t be surprised if they do.

Conversely, the Detroit Tigers are still being looked at favourably despite falling to pieces in 2015 and falling to the bottom of the division. They’ve just become the first MLB team to hand out two $100m+ contracts in the same off-season – signing outfielder Justin Upton and pitcher Jordan Zimmermann – so their worst-to-first intentions are clear. If they get some luck with good health to their key players – and that’s a big if – then they just might do it.

AL West

Look through all the predictions and this is the division that has the most people scratching their head when trying to pick a winner. If in doubt, the best starting place is to look back to how things turned out last season, and that would mean the West being a Texas two-step battle once again.

The Houston Astros’ excellent 2015 was a surprise even to the team itself and they will be an exciting club again this year with Carlos Correa and Dallas Keuchel leading the way. It’s worth remembering, though, that they got off to a dazzling start by winning 15 of their 22 games in April and then played just a shade over .500 the rest of the way (71-69) to an 86-76. They will enter this season with expectations on their shoulders, so we’ll have to say how they carry that load.

The Texas Rangers went in the other direction. They struggled through April and on 3rd of May were bottom of the division on an 8-16 record, 9.5 games behind the leading Astros. The Rangers then swept a three-game series in Houston on their way to a 19-11 May and ultimately swept past their Lone Star State rivals on 15 September to go on and win the division.

All of which means that we shouldn’t overact to how the standings look at the end of the first month. The full 162-game regular season showed that both the Astros and Rangers were good teams in 2015 and, irrespective of their April records this year, that’s likely to be the case again in 2016.

My predictions

AL East – Toronto, Boston (WC), NY Yankees, Tampa Bay, Baltimore.

AL Central – Kansas City, Cleveland (WC), Detroit, Chicago WS, Minnesota.

AL West – Texas, Houston, Seattle, LA Angels, Oakland.