Last Week in Baseball! - Strug-a-ling

If you are like us, you grew up on Mel Allen and “This Week in Baseball.” Here at WCT, we have “Last Week in Baseball!” Please don't sue us Fox!

Well sports fans, its Memorial Day, the unofficial beginning of summer. We are through basically two months of baseball, so it is officially no longer “early.” In other words, the people and teams that we had high expectations for and have sucked so far are officially having sucky years, and, in many cases, it will take significant movement in the other direction to reverse the momentum of the suckiness. Lets examine some of the suckitude:

The New York Yankees – this is an easy and obvious one, so we will be brief here. Consider this, the Yanks went 4-8 in the so-called “12 games to define their season.” On the last day of April we said that it wasn’t panic time yet, since then, they are 12-13 and have lost six games in the standings. But have no fear Yanks fans, John Kruk has "declared" the Red Sox the AL East champs. That should make you feel better.

Andruw Jones – Yes, his OBP is a respectable (we guess) .338, but he is batting .215, and even worse, he hit .167 in May with only one home run, so things are actually getting worse. This is his free agent year too.

Alfonso Soriano – He has been able to improve his batting average to .301 with hot May (.916 OPS), but he still only has four home runs and 12 runs batted in in two months so far. Not exactly what the Cubs thought they were getting when they got him. While we’re on the Cubs…

Carlos Zambrano – 5.24 ERA so far. How are those contract negotiations going so far Big Z? Actually…You know what? The hell with it…

The Chicago Cubs – if we can kill the Yanks for their 21-27 start, then we should kill the Cubs and their 22-26 start in a laughably bad division. There are times when it looks like Lou Pinella’s head is going to explode.

Michael Young - .281 OBP? .662 OPS??

We promise we’ll be more positive next week!*

*(probably not)

Now, on to our LWIB notes!

- Names you should start to make yourself familiar with :Tim Lincecum (P Giants), and Kelly Johnson (2B Braves)

- is there a LWIB jinx? We picked Jason Schmidt to compete for the NL Cy Young, he goes on the DL. We pick Elijah Dukes to compete for the AL rookie of the year, he threatens to kill his wife and kid. Wow.

- We have to give credit where credit is due: the Phillies are proving us wrong. We buried this team back in April, and they are now over .500. They just swept the Braves, and have thrust themselves into the wild-card race (such as it is in late-May). Ryan Howard is back healthy, and Cole Hamels seems to be the real deal.

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Its our blog dammit, so we are going to talk about our team every week - A very nice weekend sweep in Detroit. We have lifted our embargo on Josh Barfield, after his .295 May and stellar defensive play at 2B. Also, Ryan Garko is officially now the Wasting Company Time man-crush. It doesn't get any easier though, with three at Fenway and the Tigers at the Jake for four.

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How ‘bout tha... er, I mean, I'll be goddamned! - We knew that Jake Peavy was good, but when did he wake up and decide that he was going to be the best pitcher in the NL? 7-1 1.47 ERA so far? Yowzers!