SBL Notebook, Week 22

Oh, it is so on in the American division. We’re talking not so much about the pennant race, where Paulo’s Zero’s enjoy a commanding 11-game lead with 25 to play, but in terms of day-to-day, week-to-week competition. If you snooze -- for a day, for a single outing by a starting pitcher, even for a few at-bats – you may well lose in this fiercely, intensely, insanely competitive division, which we are hereby nominating as the strongest, top-to-bottom, in SBL history. Here we are, four weeks from the end of the season, and every team in the AL has a winning record. Every. Single. Team. Because the skimpy SBL archives lack a record of every week’s standings in the league’s 27-year history, we have no way of knowing whether this is an unprecedented occurrence, but we’re strongly guessing that it is the first time all six teams in a division have been over .500 this late in the season. Anyway, this much we know for certain: Every team is good, in varying degrees – even the last-place Bristow’s Bat-Faced Barristers, who have been scorching hot for the last month-and-a-half, with the exception of one bad week. We understand, intellectually, that this can’t be true, but doesn’t it at least seem like about 90 percent of the best players in the majors, or at least those having the best years, belong to American division teams? Any AL team can beat any other in the league at any time, and when an AL team meets up with an NL opponent, it seems to win almost every time. That was never truer than in the most recent interleague period, when the Americans rolled up a 109-35 win-loss record, and it was certainly true again this week, when the AL won 11 of 12 interleague tilts, most by one-sided scores, the only exception being a 6-5 squeaker pulled out by Dan’s Cherry Valley Bombers over Andy’s Badgers. That W, coupled with a sweep of their intra-division games, resulted in a 6-1 week that virtually wrapped up the NL pennant for the CVBs, whose lead ballooned to 17 games over JP’s Whiteskins. With both division leaders so far ahead, the real action continues to be found in the wild-card races – three teams (second place through fourth) separated by three games in each division. The Whiteskins’ prolonged struggles have allowed Vic’s Godfathers and the injury-ravaged Patton Inmates to creep to within three games of second place in the NL, despite their rather pungent 59-78 records. The Badgers’ 1-6 hiccup this week dropped them from third to fifth place, though they’re still in the wild-card hunt, six games behind the second-place BGoff Bammers. . . . And so we lurch into the season’s final stages, and into another week of nerve-wracking, cutthroat competition in the AL, where every team owner usually reaps something enjoyable from his daily inspection of box scores, but also wonders, quietly and apprehensively: Will it be enough?