At this point, most teams have played about 12 or 13 games and I think that's a perfect time to take a look and see what's going on:
The Tampa Bay Rays are the first team to 10 wins, having just finished off a sweep of the Boston Red Sox (at Fenway mind you) and sporting a perfect 7-0 record on the road to start the year. There were a good number of analysts out there who were high on the Rays coming into this season so it's not all that surprising that they're off to a fast start, though what probably would be surprising to most people is that they've done it with the bats so far, averaging almost 5.4 runs/game, a stat which has allowed them to overcome a team ERA of 4.56.
If I asked baseball fans and asked them to tell me who has the longest active hitting streak and the highest batting average in the majors as of today, 95% would not be able to tell me. The answers? Ryan Sweeney of the A's and Jorge Cantu (CANTUUU!) of the Marlins have 13 game hitting streaks as of today. Jason Kendall, yes, that Jason Kendall, has a 12-game hitting streak and has hit safely in all 12 of his Royal starts. As a side note, the Royals have the AL's best team average at .309. That won't last, but it segues nicely into the next part of the trivia question. Scott Podsednik of the Royals is hitting .457 through the Royals first 12 games. That won't last either.
The Twins' Jason Kubel hit the first ever Home Run in the new Target Field on the day it opened, last Monday April 12th (answer to future trivia question). The Twins are 3rd in the AL (and technically the Majors as well) in HRs with 11, the Jays are leading with 13. All you Twins fans will hear me when I say it's been a LONG time since the Twins were near the league lead in HRs.
The other day I looked up the stats to see if there was any correlation between a team's record with 10-15 games played and their eventual outcome at the end of the season...the research suggests no. For example, last year at this time, the Yankees were 2.5 games behind the 10-4 Blue Jays, the Twins were in 4th place and the Angels were in last place. 25 games isn't much better; it's gonna be awhile till we can tell what's real and what's not.
This last one comes to via the ESPN Power Rankings which linked to a great article and astounding stat: "On average, the Yankees’ 2009 gate receipts for a seven game home series were greater than the Pirates’ gate receipts for the entire year." The leader in attendance so far this year is the Los Angeles Dodgers who are averaging over 47,000 per game.
You might want to recheck your stats.
ReplyDeleteI believe Cuddyer has hit a couple home runs so far at Target Field, and then there's Thome and Hudson...
Yeah, I was just thinking about that and realized the error, thanks for pointing it out, I changed it, I don't know what I was thinking...
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