Week 7 of the season and there are some exciting divisional series. Even though the season is long there is no lack of competition and currently the NL is where it’s at! This it’s what’s coming up this week in baseball.
The Pirates had a rough weekend against the Chicago Cubs where they dropped 2 of 3, but this week that have a chance to recover as they play a 4 game series against the floundering Atlanta Braves. The Braves are currently have worst record in baseball with only 9 wins. The Pirates should look to take at least 3 of the 4 games and put as much distance between themselves and the St. Louis Cardinals as possible.
The league leading Cubs 27 wins are playing the Milwaukee Brewers and will no doubt continue to assert their dominance. In fact the Cubs have had such command over the NL Central that President Theo Epstein in an interview with Chicago Tribune stated that “We are in a tree right now. We want to stay up there as long as we can, but we a bound to come down at some point.” They are trying to calm the World Series hype and stay humble because they know that everything can change in the blink of an eye.
The NL East is also in a heated battle with one another where the top 3 teams are only separated by 1.5 games and all but one of the teams in the divison is over .500. The Washington Nationals are on top with 23 wins and are riding high of the record breaking 20 strikeout performance of ace Max Scherzer. They start out the week with a 3 games series against the New York Mets. The first game match up is Scherzer vs Noah Syndergaard but this series will intense regardless of the pitchers.
The Miami Marlins and the Philadelphia Phillies are also playing an important series this week. Both these teams have been at or near the bottom of their division for the past few seasons and finally seem to be gaining some traction. The Phillies are currently in 2nd place with 22 wins (1 game ahead of the Mets) and the Marlins in sitting in the 4th spot and are just above .500 with 19 wins. None of the pitchers seem to be overly dominate so these games will be decided by the crack of a bat.
The NL East series continue into the weekend when the Nationals take a trip to Miami. The experience of manager Don Mattingly and hitting coach Barry Bonds has been doing the Marlins good and obviously they will have to know how to beat the Nationals if they want to make their mark on this division. It will be interesting to see how the rest of the season unfolds.
Now we’ll take a look at the AL.
Starting Monday the Tampa Bay Rays play an important series against the the Toronto Blue Jays. The Blue Jays sit at .500 and the Rays right below at .457. The Tuesday game will be a Rays opening day rematch between Chris Archer (Rays) and Marcus Stroman (Blue Jays). Archer has had a rough start to the season and hasn’t won a game against the Blue Jays this yet where Stroman has won both his against the Rays. The Rays bats have heating up since their last meeting at the beginning of May and hopefully that will enable them to win the series and get back above .500.
Aside from the Cubs, there is another team in Chicago that has also been turning heads; the White Sox. The White Sox have the most wins in the AL with 24 and are looking at add a few more when they begin paying the Houston Astros at home on Tuesday. The Cinderella Astros team of 2015 has yet to find their glass slippers this season. Right now they sit at the bottom of the AL West with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and unless the White Sox hit a slump, that is where they are staying for this series.
Stay tuned for updates later this week….
