The debates raging in the press as to who should be the starting pitcher for the AL all star team seems a bit ridiculous.  With a bevy of bona fide candidates, ESPN has chosen CC Sabathia as the hands down winner.   I see some fault to this line of thinking and though I may be biased, I have been watching the emergence of Dan Haren in Oakland.  This guy hits his spots and rarely if ever gives in to the hitter, insisting on pitching to the corners and hitting them too!  His stats are unbelievable, only 68 hits in 104 innings pitched.  He has the lowest WHIP (walks and hits per innings pitched) of any pitcher in the league, with only James Shields (at 0.97) rivaling his 0.88 WHIP average.  Sabatthia, Lackey, and Beckett are all in the 1.11 to 1.16 range. 

Haren’s runs allowed is miniscule compared to Sabathia and is lower than anyone else in the league, hands down, no discussion.  So if anyone should be the starting pitcher for the AL in the SF All Star game, it should be Haren.  He continues to pitch well as the season progresses and his body type as well as motion should ensure an injury free season too.   He certainly makes Billy Beane look good as Haren came to the A’s in the Mulder deal, along with a valuable reliever, Kiko Calero, as well as a blue chip prospect (Daric Barton).   Mulder languishes on the DL recovering from shoulder surgery and his St. Louis Cardinals languish in the lowly NL Central division.

The departure of Armando Benitez from SF was supposed to placate the fan base here in SF, but still the losses mount and it is not due to Benitez (or his absence), but rather to the absence of any consistency to the offense.  The Giants have traditionally been an offensive team with some good pitching, but not the dominance that they have displayed this year.  Ranked 3^rd in the NL, their starting pitchers have been a relevelation while their relievers have been mostly pretty good, logging the FEWEST innings of any relief staff in the league.  But their offense, anchored around an aging Barry Bonds is not very daunting to opposing staffs.  They rank 13^th out of 16 teams in the NL in runs scored, and that tells it all, with only Houston, the Nationals and St. Louis ranked below them.  Without SOME offensive punch, this team is doomed, even if they say pitching and defense win games.  

The Giants HAVE pitching and their defense, while thought to be old, has only committed  37 errors, the fourth fewest in the NL so clearly this team has defied, yet again, one of the axioms of success in baseball.  Leave it to a team from the west coast to turn the heads of baseball statisticians and leave them scratching their heads.  Brian Sabean, too, must be wondering what’s going on, having been dubbed a genius in the past, he is now relegated to looking over his shoulder to see if the ax may fall on his head.  Comfortably mired in last place, trailing the 4^th place Rockies by 4.5 games, this season appears to be a “lost” one, and it will be interesting to see how they will go about re-building for the future, something that should have been addressed last winter.  Give them credit though, they did try to sign Carlos Lee and Alfonso Soriano before resigning themselves to another year with Bonds as the “franchise” player.

The Yankees are like a phoenix rising from the ashes.  Written off by everyone earlier, especially their own fans, this team has won 9 out of 10 and is making a comeback of sorts in the AL East.  Now 8.5 games behind their perrenial rivals, the Red Sox, they seem to be on course to push through the summer to make it very interesting for the front running Red Sox.  After all, are memories so short as to forget the monumental collapse of the Boston team last August?  T

he Yankees have the second best offense in the league (behind Detroit), and the 7^th best pitching staff in terms of ERA and the fifth best defense in the league.   As maligned as their pitching has been, their team ERA is on the rebound and with Clemens back on board, they will undoubtedly be inspired to perform, and Steinbrenner will be looking for pitching help before the July 31 trading deadline.  With those kind of numbers, do not count them out, as it is much too early to do so.

The steroid inquisition in baseball continues, with the focus upon Jason Giambi.  He had the audacity to apologize for doing something wrong (he never said EXACTLY what it was that he had done, but we all know what he was saying), and then he went out on a limb and said that major league baseball was partially responsible for everything that has happened in the game.  He is now the villain, facing a possible suspension from baseball czar, Bud Selig.   Instead of taking responsibility for what has gone wrong with the game in the past 15 years, Selig is out to vilify the most convenient target who raises his head, in this case Giambi.  Bonds is silent on the Giambi fiasco as is every other player in the game, including his teammates.  The baseball players association may stand up for Giambi, but it will not be players who do the talking bur rather their lawyers. 

The bottom line is this – major league baseball executives, managers, and trainers knew exactly what was going on with these players and steroids and did nothing to stop or discourage it.  Now they do not want to take responsibility for their actions, which if they did so, would shed light on the controversy and at the same time, quell it too. 

But they prefer scapegoats and obfuscation of the issues…a real tragedy given the fact that steroids and performance enhancing drugs are integral to what has now been dubbed the national game, football.   If they could only get it right, major league baseball could weather this storm and come out of it all like a paragon of virtue rather than as the slimy, seedy scene that it has become.