SBL Notebook, Week 25

Congratulations to the Zero's, whose long-expected coronation as American division champions becomes official as of today. They went 7-0 in Week 25, while the second-place Moaners went 3-4 to drop seven games back with six to play, and that, as they say in baseball, was that. Meanwhile, there's more "that" to be determined in the National division, where both races are coming down to the final week. the Cherry Valley Bombers are still looking like good bets for the division title, maintaining the four-game lead they enjoyed last week, but the wild-card race is now a dead heat between the Godfathers and the Derelicts. More on that in a bit; first, let us celebrate the mighty Z's. The Zero's have occupied first place in the AL and kept the Best Record In Ball under lock and key since Week 14, so nothing about their clinching comes as a surprise. Nonetheless, after their little 2-4 hiccup in Week 24 had allowed the Moaners to make a very brief threatening gesture, pulling to within three games, the Z's put pedal to metal and wrapped things up with a kill-'em-all-including-the-women-and-children performance that included two 11-0 shutouts, two 10.5-.5 wipeouts and two 9-2 blowouts. Pouring it on as if intent on eradicating any lingering doubt about just who was the bull-goose loony in the AL asylum (like there was any doubt to begin with), the Zero's racked up 43 runs, 41 RBIs, 11 HRs, a .389 OBP, 2.38 ERA, .82 BR stat, 1.13 K-rate and 6 saves. So comprehensive was their dominance that even the white-hot Bombers, 29-2 over the previous five weeks and quite possibly destined for a postseason showdown with the Z's, were humbled by the AL champs in a 9-2 interleague defeat. . . . This is hardly virgin territory for the Zero's, who've lived in the SBL's high-rent district for years. This is their second AL flag in three years and their third consecutive playoff berth -- in 2009 they won "the whole . . . f**kin' . . . thing," as Indians catcher Jake Taylor put it in "Major League" -- and they've finished lower than second place only twice since 2004. Now, it's on to the playoffs, where the Z's first-round opponent will be . . . who the f**k knows? The Godfathers had been scuffling since the end of interleague play, going 11-14 in Weeks 21-24 to fall from first place to third in the NL. But they put it all together in Week 25, bashing their way to a 7-0 run fueled by league-leading totals in RBIs (43), OBP (.391) and TB (39). The CVBs went 5-2 -- to repeat, that's as many losses as the Bombers had suffered in the previous five weeks combined -- and so did the Derelicts, whose two-game edge on the Godfathers dissolved into a second-place tie, and here we are. . . . We head into the final week with clear lines between haves and have-nots, a situation we'd largely avoided for most of a season marked by unusual competitive balance. With one week to go, however, we have something that looks closer to the customary SBL stratification -- one 101-win team (Zero's), four in the 90s (CVBs, M's, G-Daddies, DD's), and everyone else well below the top tier. A late-season fade by the Bammers (1-18 the last three weeks, an exact counterpoint to their 18-1 start back in April) has dragged them all the way down to .500, leaving the Zero's and Moaners as the only AL teams with winning records. In the NL, fifth-place DamianUnited, who'd been flirting with it for weeks, finally dipped below the break-even point (76-80) with an 0-7 accident, and the Inmates, in first place as recently as Week 19, went 2-5, continuing a prolonged slide (11-33 the last seven weeks) that has left them just four games above .500.