The Futility Infielder

• What a difference a week makes. Last Sunday morning the Yanks awoke with a collective hangover from two consecutive poundings by the Boston Red Sox and a lead in the AL East that had dwindled to 2.5 games. In the past seven days, they've taken a huge game from the Sox, won a makeup game from the Blue Jays, and cut through a pair of the league's worst teams like a hot knife through butter. With eight straight wins under their belt, they woke up this Sunday having opened a 5.5 game lead on the Sox, and their magic number for winning the AL East is down to 10.
But there's still plenty of suspense to be had around both leagues. The three-team race in the AL Central finds the Chicago White Sox and the Minnesota Twins tied at the top, meaning that the outcome of the Great Sushi Bet of 2003 (I have the Twins vs. the rest of the Central) is still in doubt. The Kansas City Royals, who topped last season's win total over a month ago, have dropped an axle over the past two weeks or so, going 5-10 against some mediocre competition and falling to 3.5 out. The Oakland A's are perched atop the AL West with a 2.5 game lead over Seattle, and the Mariners are a mere half-game behind the Red Sox for the Wild Card. All told, that's 7 out of 14 teams in the AL who remain alive.

The NL is, if anything, even more contentious. While both the Atlanta Braves and the San Francisco Giants have wide leads in the NL East and West, respectively, the NL Central and the Wild Card remain up for grabs. In the Central, the Houston Astros hold a slim half-game lead over the Chicago Cubs, with the St. Louis Cardinals, like their I-70 rivals, fading at 3.5 games out. The Cards, who've dropped 9 of 13, are becoming unhinged, with manager Tony LaRussa accusing ump Jerry Crawford of being out to get them. The Florida Marlins, led by their 72-year-old manager Jack McKeon, have overcome the medieval torture methods of predecessor Jeff Torborg to take the Wild Card lead over the streaky Philadelphia Phillies by 2.5 games. At 3.5 games back, the Los Angeles Dodgers find themselves hanging on in the Wild Card race by their fingernails -- despite getting exactly eleven base hits over the past month, or something like that. The Cubs are four back in the Wild Card While a week ago one could have counted the Arizona Diamondbacks and Montreal Expos at long odds in the WC race, both can be safely counted out at 7.5 and 8.5 games back, respectively. All told, that's 8 out of 16 teams still alive in the NL, meaning that with two weeks to go, half of the majors' teams still have postseason hopes. I'm not a huge fan of the Wild Card, but I'll concede that's pretty incredible, and it should be a very interesting couple of weeks for game and scoreboard watching.

• Speaking of less favored innovations, after seven seasons of interleague play, MLB has finally gotten around to scheduling what may be The Unsurpassable Marquee Matchup. I'll give you a hint: it's the one featuring my two favorite teams.

The initial goal of interleague play was to rotate the matchups between divisions from year to year, but for the first five years, MLB stuck itself in a rut by matching each division in the AL with its geographic counterpart in the NL. In 2002, the divisions rotated for the first time, and they spun again this year.

But despite the fact that the Barry Bonds-led San Francisco Giants and the then-champion Arizona Diamondbacks visited Yankee Stadium last season, and that the Yanks visited such distant western outposts as Colorado and San Diego, one NL West opponent was conspicuously absent from the Yankees' schedule: the L.A. Dodgers.

You'd think that above all else, MLB -- not to mention the two teams -- would have wanted to cash in on an historic rivalry that has produced no fewer than eleven World Series matchups (1941, '47, '49, '52, '53, '55, '56, '63, '77, '78, and '81), the most of any two teams and the subject of untold numbers of books. But far be it for Bud Selig to show that much imagination in the face of all of those Pittsburgh-Minnesota matchups. But now, according to the Los Angeles Times, the soon-to-be-released 2004 schedule has the Yanks paying a visit to Dodger Stadium for a three-day series during the weekend of June 18-20.

Is it too early to buy tickets? My little head might just explode.

• Belated congratulations to Mike Carminati of Mike's Baseball Rants and his wife on the birth of a baby boy. Alas, there's absolutely no truth to the rumor that the little one is named Joe Morgan Chat Day Carminati.

• The world of baseball blogging is largely a male one, so it's a breath of fresh air to see a woman join the ranks. Irina Paley, a Washington Heights native, Columbia University student and computer programmer with whom I've been corresponding lately, has started West 116th Street, which she describes as "a mostly baseball blog, by way of the Upper West Side." Following up on my King Kaufman-related post, Irina has a good piece relating to a Thomas Boswell quote: "Baseball is religion without the mischief." Check it out.