Two Best Baseball Teams Set to Decide Fate of Earth

The Mariners moved up in the overall ranks from 23rd before the start of the Blue Jays series to 20th now.

With back to back sweeps and a gain of about 30 runs in performance over the past week, I assume that the Mariners are clearly the very best baseball team that has ever been or ever will be assembled. Challenging that notion are the stupid dumb Yankees from their stupid dumb pissant little village of Newark or some such place.

Yeah, you will need a new ark, Yankees, because here comes another great flood. Of Mariners. Which can sail on water. Hence we'll survive and y'all will be like "noooooo, our kingdom for an ark!" Should have been planning ahead.

When the lineup excludes Miguel Olivo and Chone Figgins, it is a rather enjoyable one to view. Gaze and feast your eyes upon all the almost-.300 batting averages!

P/PA = pitches per PA [avg~3.8], nBB = uBB + HBP, Sw = swinging [avg~45%], Ct = contact [avg~81%], Qual+ = a measure of quality of batted balls [avg=100, higher is better]

Another walk or four would be nice to see Mr. Michael Saunders.

I see that Ichiro Suzuki is still being old Ichiro.

The Mariners and the Yankees are like chiral defenses!

Kevin Millwood remains a Mariner, though if rumors are to be believed, not for lack of other teams trying. At least a few teams inquired on Millwood's availability, but the Mariners asked for more than they were interested in surrendering so the reports go. At first blush that seems intriguing and worthy of passing along. It speaks obliquely to intentions. Perhaps however you see that such a report applies to probably 15 players, maybe more, on the Mariners alone and frankly doesn't tell us much of anything at all. So talks got closer, maybe, concerning Millwood than they did with, say, Felix, but the same type of talks probably happened and yielded the same result; the Mariners wanted more than what was offered.

Just narrowly missed a Hiroki Kuroda versus Hisashi Iwakuma starting pitcher match up which would have been created a lot of meaningless topics. Whew! Glad that was avoided. Now back to your regularly scheduled 7,459th post about how the Mariners need/should/must/better/damn well better/how dare they/get on their knees and beg to trade Felix Hernandez to the Yankees.

Str% = strike rate [avg~63%], Ct% = contact rate [avg~78%], GB% = groundball rate [avg~45%], Qual- = a measure of quality of batted balls [avg=100, lower is better], LI = leverage [avg~1.2]

In case you missed it, the pen going forward could be special.

With the recent spate of winning, but not quite blowing teams away comes a marked increase in leverage for the end of games and you can see that reflected in the final column above where almost every pitcher has lately been above the league average.

Series Drink: Stone Smoked Porter w/Vanilla Bean
A very tasty beer that only now is entering or re-entering wide circulation in bottles. I've seen it around town already. It may not be worth buying repeatedly, as it is on the pricey side, but if you haven't tried this or the chipotle-infused one, I recommend the experience.