Opening Thoughts

A few thoughts on the opening couple days of the Major League Season:

1. Watched the opening night game between the Mets and Cardinals, a rematch of the NLCS last year. First, the Mets looked awesome. Watching Tom Glavine pitch is a lot like watching Kenny Rogers pitch. Like Rogers, Glavine doesn't throw hard anymore but can hit his spots like nobody's business. It was a piece of art. If Glavine and at least two other guys in that rotation are any good consistently this year, the Mets will be in the playoffs. Meanwhile, the Cardinals looked awful. It looked like Tony LaRussa wasn't even trying, Chris Duncan never made it into the game when they needed an offensive jump start. Now that their ace pitcher, Chris Carpenter is out for at least one start, they are in trouble. If this injury lasts more than a handful of starts the Cardinals are in very serious trouble.

2. The Tigers came out a little flat on opening day. However, the fact that they rallied from 3 down off of Roy Halladay was pretty great. In the end, the bats went silent and Fernando Rodney (right) couldn't hold the game close. Too bad. In the game today, they started out hot. They were up 10-2 and held on to win 10-9, again, not good. A friend of mine attended the game and said that the Blue Jays comeback was filled with bloop singles and fielding mistakes probably caused by the wind. These are valid reasons, but that's April in the midwest and northeast, and the Blue Jays were playing in the same conditions. It's pretty clear right now that Rodney is really struggling but I like how Leyland had him pitch again today. Rodney is good, he's just off right now. He'll come back around.

3. Made it home on opening day in time to catch quite a bit of the Roylas-Red Sox game. I have made it no secret on here that the Royals are my second favorite team. You may also recall that I stuck up for the Gil Meche signing. Meche and the Royals completely shutdown Curt Schilling and the Red Sox. The crowd in Kansas City was excited, the ovation prospect Alex Gordon got was awesome. I think that Kansas City is a lot like Detroit, in that if there is a reasonably good team on the field people are really going to show up. Of course it's only one game and it's possibly they could still lose 100 games with Meche losing 18 or so. We will see.

4. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays are really exciting to watch. I saw a couple of innings of their opener in Yankee Stadium. They really didn't seem intimidated, just a really young, raw team, that won't win much, but will really fun to watch and could be amazing in a couple of years. Leading the way will be Delmon Young (left), Rocco Baldelli, BJ Upton, and Elijah Dukes.

5. A lot of buzz about the Yankees outfield. Word is they are awful defensively. Evidently, Matsui and Damon are getting slower and their arms are getting weaker by the week. This could be bad news for them as the season progresses.

6. To respond to the lone comment on my last post as to why I don't think the Tigers can win it all I will say this: I feel that if Polanco, Guillen, or Pudge get hurt the Tigers will be in serious trouble for the amount of time any of them are out. Also, the Tigers young pitching staff threw a lot of innings last year because of the playoff games and because they had to pitch in big games down the stretch of the regular season. This all adds up to them being a lot more likely to getting tired arms this year, the player most likely to struggle as a result of this is Justin Verlander. If Verlander does indeed go out for a while, that will a lot of time with him and Kenny Rogers. The main reason I didn't pick them to win is because I didn't want to jinx them.