A Short Baseball Round-Up

The regular season ended yesterday.

I watched a bunch of the Rangers-Athletics game, and the Rangers finished their implosion with a wretched game yesterday that allowed Oakland to leapfrog them for the AL West title. Texas is still a wildcard team, which---with the new format this year---really is much worse than winning a division (and that is why I like this change).

Baltimore has made the postseason as the other AL wildcard team.

Miguel Cabrera won the first hitters Triple Crown since 1967 (making it the first in my lifetime), though Mike Trout deserves the MVP by a mile over Cabrera. It is extremely awesome that Cabrera got the Triple Crown---which one gets by leading a league or tying for a league lead in each of homeruns, RBIs, and batting average---but his season still comes nowhere close to the one Trout had. Trout will obviously win the AL Rookie of the Year Award---his season was probably the best rookie season ever---but he deserves the MVP as well (and, again, nobody else is anywhere close).

As expected, adding a second wildcard and making the battle between wildcard pairs in each league 1 and gone (i.e., a one-game playoff for a chance to advance to a Division Series) has really improved things massively.

The Red Sox fired Bobby Valentine today. I am shocked. SHOCKED, I say :) That marriage was doomed from day 1. (Additionally, the Red Sox finished in last place in an utterly disastrous season. It was their worst season in a very long time.)

(Sorry for not putting links to player stats and articles and so on, but I am feeling really overwhelmed right now and need to get back to other things, so I'm going to forego them this time.)