Much of the 2008 season has gone according to script. The AL has continued to treat the NL like a flabby younger sibling in interleague play; a Dusty Baker–managed team has stacked the top of its batting order with walk-resistant retreads; and the Mets, Blue Jays, and Mariners have invented girly reasons to ax their short-bus managers (“he is a complicated communicator”). But there have also been numerous otherworldly, unexpected happenings that prompted us to scratch our chins and exclaim “golly!” or occasionally even “you don’t say!” You know, like...
Tampa no longer sucks quite as suckily
Kids. They grow up so fast. The newly non-demonic Rays were supposed to spend 2008 selling their residence in the AL East cellar (during the sub-prime crisis, no less), then start pushing towards bona fide contention in 2009 and beyond. Instead, the 20-somethings (especially the robo-awesome Evan Longoria) realized their sizable potential way early and ran circles around teams used to treating the Rays the way the Globetrotters treated the Generals. This team does everything 35 percent faster than the Yankees do, except invest in high-yield securities. Prepare for a massive influx of bandwagon fans, who will say stuff like “I love watching them play! They’re so adorable! Strip them, bathe them, and bring them to my tent!”
Barry Bonds can’t find a job
Barry Bonds beat the dickens out of his wife in full public view during a Boston road trip... no, wait, that was the Phillies’ Brett Myers. Barry Bonds got nailed for DUI while “resting” in his car at a busy intersection... no, silly us, that was Tony La Russa. Barry Bonds hit .216 with a .264 on-base percentage and a .321 slugging percentage... no, dagnabbit, that’s the 2008 line for Mariners DH Jose Vidro, who once curb-stomped an adorable puppy for sass-barking him. Barry Bonds tested positive for performance-enhancing substances... no, blasted short-term memory, that was Guillermo Mota and Mike Cameron and Rafael Betencourt and Ryan Franklin and Jose Guillen and Juan Rincon. Our bad.
It is possible to make a mutually beneficial baseball trade that doesn’t involve huge piles of money changing hands
During the off-season, roughly 27,293 column inches and 98,222,104 adverbs were devoted to the discussion of the Twins trading Johan Santana and the Marlins auctioning off Miguel Cabrera. Yet the one deal that now stands as the game’s most interesting since the Dodgers sent a wee bitty Pedro Martinez to the Expos for established star Delino DeShields is the one nobody paid attention to: the Reds sending Josh Hamilton, who loved heroin so much he friended it on Facebook, to Texas for Edinson Volquez, who was demoted to single-A ball last summer for being an incorrigible pain in the ass. Barring injury or a massive late-June performance apocalypse, both will be All-Stars this summer. Great work all around.
The Cardinals are to pitching staffs what MacGyver was to improvised apple-core firearms
At the start of training camp, the Cards had precisely one contender-caliber starter in their rotation (Adam Wainwright) and a bunch of retreads in the pen (like Jason Isringhausen, whose current defining baseball trait is the number of vowels in his last name). Yet here we are at midseason, with starters-turned-relievers-turned-starters-again Braden Looper and Todd Wellemeyer worthy of All-Star consideration and scrapheap finds like Joel Pineiro and Kyle Lohse not too far behind. Cards pitching coach Dave Duncan is like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yogi Berra rolled into one adorable package.