SBL Notebook, Week 10

The end of the first round of interleague play couldn't have come soon enough for the National division, which lost the cross-divisional battle for the fourth consecutive week, this time by the humbling count of 31-5. That brought the final four-week tally to American 95, National 49. This was, let's say, unexpected, and it's a little difficult to divine just what happened here. There had been no indication during the first six weeks that the results of the first IL period would be so one-sided; in fact the NL entered Week 7 with a slight advantage, having won 25 of the 48 interleague games contested to that point. But then several NL teams simultaneously commenced a May-June swoon that coincided with the start of interleague play, and the AL took advantage. The Derelicts (3-21 the last four weeks), the Whiteskins (4-20), the Godfathers (7 -17) and the Inmates (8-16) spent the interleague period spinning their wheels in the mud, and by the time it was over all four teams were well below .500 (ranging from eight games under to 26), with only the Cherry Valley Bombers and DamianUnited left standing and relatively unscathed at the top of the heap. Meanwhile, the entire AL prospered, with all six teams posting winning records over the four-week stretch, led by the Badgers (19-5), the Pumped-Up Pontiffs (17-7) and the Zero's (also 17-7). The result was virtually no movement in the AL standings -- the Z's, BTIB with a 42-20 record, are three, four and six games ahead of the three teams closest to them in the standings; four weeks ago those margins were three, four and five games -- but six owners who could feel a little better about themselves and their teams' prospects for having spent the last month inflating their records at the NL's expense. Five of the six AL teams are above .500 at the moment, and none among that quintet is further than nine games back in the standings. The NL race has devolved into a two-team affair, with the Bombers -- whose 2-4 ledger was the best the Nationals could muster this week -- four games up on DamU, while the third-place Inmates have dropped 12 games in arrears. . . . The Holy Crusaders continue to ravage the land with their mighty bats, which this week produced 15 HRs and 43 RBIs, both league highs. In the last three weeks, the pointy-hatted horde has swatted 42 home runs and driven in 119 runs. Good God, man!

SBL Notebook, Week 9

Someone, perhaps the Big SBL God in the Sky, reached down and pushed the celestial pause button on us this week. The third week of interleague play was virtually a break-even affair – although it goes into the books as a 19-17 American division victory, their third IL win in a row, and the Americans will take it, thank you very much. And the division races were virtually unchanged – the Cherry Valley Bombers and runners-up DamianUnited both went 2-4 and remained three games apart in the NL, while (in the big 80-point headline here) Andy’s Badgers chipped a whole entire game off of the Zero’s advantage in the AL, trimming it to a mere two games. With a severely truncated MLB schedule on Thursday, plate appearances were down considerably, almost to Week 1 levels, and that helped depress hitting numbers pretty much across the board. The glaring exception was the Formerly Puny, Now Prodigiously Pounding Pontiffs, who rung up 14 HRs, 43 RBIs, 36 runs and a .373 OBP. That, plus a spiffy 2.66 ERA and six saves, lifted the Raging Papists to a 6-0 week and into third place, three games behind the resilient Zero’s, who went 4-2 and extended their occupation of the AL catbird seat to the six-week mark. After a 10-15 start, the normally docile Team Vatican has gone 23-8 over a five-week stretch to insinuate itself into the thick of the AL chase at 33-23. . . . One week of interleague competition to go, then it’s back to mixing with our own kind.

SBL Notebook, Week 8

It was the damnedest thing. The American division won the interleague tussle for the second straight week, which was surprising enough in itself, just from looking at some of the semi-ugly numbers accumulated by several AL teams. And the margin of victory, a fairly decisive 24-12, that was a surprise too. But the way all this came about, how the wins and losses broke down, well that was just seriously weird. Two National division teams, the front-running Cherry Valley Bombers and runners-up DamianUnited, just rolled over all six AL foes; nobody really came close to beating them. But then the other four NL clubs combined to go 0-24. Which means, as you advanced mathematics aficionados have no doubt already figured out, that all six AL squads posted the exact same WL ledger for the week, 4-2, keeping the division standings the same as last week (except for win-loss totals and percentages). Not so in the NL, where what had been a more-or-less competitive three- or four-team race was blown wide open. DamU remained three games behind the defending champion CVBs, of course, but the Inmates, Whiteskins, Godfathers and Derelicts all lost six games to the leaders and suddenly trail by 12, 15, 18 and 20, respectively. . . . The hard-luck award for the week probably should go to the Batfaced Barristers, who continued their horsehide-abusing ways with 12 HRs, 50 RBIs and 41 runs, only to see those incredible numbers bettered by the CVBs (16 HRs, 54 BI, 42 R), the key difference in the Bombers’ 7-4 victory. DamU was simply ultra-solid across the board – league-bests in OBP (.383), saves (8) and K-rate (1.05), and good-to-very-good numbers in every other category – to best the triple-Bs by the same 7-4 count. But it seemed just a little unjust that the Batfaces’ prodigious numbers could produce no more than four wins, the same number of Ws posted by the far more pedestrian Zero’s, Moaners and Puny Pontiffs. Had this been a week of intra-division competition, the Barristers would have obliterated those three teams by 9-2, 8-3 and 7.5-3.5 scores, respectively. But life, and baseball, ain’t always fair, and it just so happened that the other four NL teams were unable to offer much resistance against anyone this week, even the AL’s lesser achievers. The Godfathers were undone by puny hitting in almost every stat, the Inmates, Whiteskins and Derelicts by horrific pitching (8.02, 7.11 and 5.16 ERAs, respectively).

SBL Notebook, Week 7

The first week of the first month of pure interleague play this season went to the American division, 21-15. Nothing particularly unusual about that; the AL has been the dominant force in cross-divisional competition for at least the past decade, with the exception of last year when the National division turned the tables. What was unusual, just a little bit, was the identity of the team that did the heavy lifting for the AL with a scorched-earth 6-0 sunburst. The team in question are the Batfaced Girls, one of two AL franchises that have never appeared in the SBL postseason. The other of those longtime down-on-their-luck clubs, the Puny Pontiffs, had served notice the previous two weeks that it just might have the personnel to make a serious run at its first playoff berth, and this time it was the Batfaces’ turn in a no-doubt-about-it performance that featured one 11-0 whitewash, a 10.5-0.5 thumping, a 9.5-1.5 win and three 9-2 triumphs. Talk about dominant: the BFGs’ offense, heavily dependent on the Baltimore Orioles (of all teams) with Adam Jones, J.J. Hardy and Matt Wieters, and spiced up by MLB batting leader David Wright, led the SBL this week in RBIs (42), TB (42) and OBP (.396) and was second in runs (35) and third in HRs (10) and SBs (7). If that wasn’t enough, they also had perhaps the league’s best pitching, topping the week with a 2.06 ERA and posting the second-best BR stat (1.10) -- thank you, Roy Halladay, Ted Lilly, Colby Lewis and James McDonald. . . . The unbeaten week lifted the BFGs alongside the Pontiffs as legit factors in the AL race – the Girls now occupy third place at 24-20, a game ahead of the PPs (who backslid with a 2-4 ledger after going 11-2 in weeks 5-6), four behind the pacesetting Zero’s and one back of the Badgers, who went 5-1 and moved up to second. The bottom of the AL deck features the somewhat jarring sight of the Moaners and the Bammers, who between them claim a dozen SBL championships, holding down the next-to-last and last spots, respectively. . . . Nothing much happened in the NL race, where the top three teams – the Cherry Valley Bombers, DamianUnited and the Inmates – all went 4-2, leaving the top of the standings unchanged. The CVBs, however, did nose ahead of the Zero’s for Best Record In Ball, by one game, while maintaining their three-game edge in the division. Another mildly jarring sight – the Derelicts, a playoff team last year, continuing their residence in the NL basement, an 0-6 week dropping them to 15-29.

SBL Notebook, Week 6

Best. Week. Ever . . . ? Hard to say for sure, but the week just completed by Josh Hamilton of the Texas Rangers – and more to the point, of the Pulverizin’ Pontiffs – has to rank with any this observer can recall. We do distinctly remember a Ken Griffey Jr. streak of eight consecutive games with a home run – it was July 1993, we just looked that up, and it tied a major league record last previously achieved by one Don Mattingly in July 1987. But Junior’s torrid stretch, and Mattingly’s before it, straddled two SBL weeks. The damage Hamilton inflicted on unsuspecting MLB pitchers, within the confines of a single week, must be something close to unprecedented in SBL annals. Beginning Monday, the binge-hitting (and drinking!) slugger launched a staggering nine home runs (four in one game, famously), more than all but three entire SBL teams managed for the week. He also drove in 18 runs, scored 10 and went 15 for 30. He might have had more than two measly doubles, if only he hadn’t kept accidentally hitting the ball over the fence instead of off it. Oh, and the worthless, lazy dog did not steal a single base! Trade him immediately! . . . One of the more amazing things about his week was that he walked only four times . . . like, what were these people thinking, pitching to this guy almost every time he stepped in? The least they could’ve done was stuck one in his ear hole a time or two. . . . Hamilton’s power surge lifted the normally mild-mannered Popesters (previously known as the Puny Pontiffs, after all) to SBL season highs in home runs (17) and RBIs (46) – and right into the thick of the American division race after a 5-1 week that catapulted them to third place with a 21-17 record, four games behind the front-running Zero’s and one back of runners-up Moaners. . . . The National division standings feature a familiar sight this week, after the Cherry Valley Bombers, the defending league champions, climbed to the top of the heap with a 5-1 week, displacing DamianUnited, whose 1-5 stumble knocked them three games back. . . . It was another week of excruciatingly close competition, with 20 games decided by scores of 6-5, 6.5-4.5 or in tiebreakers. The Godfathers notched three such narrow victories in a 5-1 week that continued their impressive recovery from an 0-13/1-18 start – they’ve gone 15-4 the last three weeks to escape the cellar, and, at 16-22 and nine games back, are inching their way into the NL race. The G-Daddies manager might want to remind his troops, during his next clubhouse pep talk, that the 2011 champion Bombers were 10-28 at this very point last season. . . . Four weeks of interleague play commence this week, with the NL champing at the bit to engineer a repeat of its decisive eight-week clubbing of the AL last year.

SBL Notebook, Week 5

You want pitchers? We got ‘em, right here in the National division. No belly itchers or glasses of water allowed on the premises . . . and no margin for error, either. It was pitch or perish this week in the NL, where no fewer than three teams checked in with sub-2.00 ERAs and sub-1.00 BR stats. DamianUnited’s ostensibly spiffy 2.72 ERA and 1.04 BR stat? Sorry, fellas, you’re losing those categories to half your division mates. The big winners for the week were the Derelicts, who combined lights-out mound work (1.97 ERA, league-leading .81 BR, 3-0 WL) with some very solid offense (league-best 41 RBIs and .375 OBP) to go 7-0 and escape the NL cellar, where the Godfathers tumbled back in despite their own perfectly satisfactory 5-2 week. Most disappointed losers of the week were the Whiteskins, whose sensational chucking (.92 BR, week’s-best 1.74 ERA) was compromised by across-the-board offensive puniness, causing the ‘Skins to go 2-5. The aforementioned DamU, meanwhile, did enough things well -- 11 HRs, 7 SBs, 7 saves, .95 K-rate, in addition to their ERA/BR numbers – to go 5-2 and move into first place in what is shaping up as a competitive, but fluid, NL race. DamU, 16-3 the last three weeks, are a game ahead of defending champs, the Cherry Valley Bombers, and two up on the up-and-down Inmates, who vacated the penthouse for the first time this year. . . . American division teams did not pitch nearly as well – three had ERAs of 4.25 or higher, including an unsightly 6.02 for the Badgers – and paid for it in the seven-game week’s 12 interleague contests, 10 of which the NL won. The runner-up Badgers’ horrific hurling resulted in an 0-7 crash, which enabled the Zero’s to quadruple their lead, from one game to four, despite a less-than-scintillating 3-4 performance. The Z’s also maintained the Best Record In Ball for a second successive week; they’re 22-10 to DamU’s 21-11. The Moaners, who also pitched piss-poorly, were unable to take full advantage of the Badgers’ pratfall, going 2-5 to remain in third place.

SBL Notebook, Week 3

There is no fear of intimacy in the Sun Baseball League, where every team is willing to get as close as is legally permitted, regardless of race, creed, gender, sexual orientation or religious affiliation. It’s hard to envision a week much closer, both in terms of game scores and statistical totals, than the one we just experienced. Twenty of 36 games were decided by scores of 6-5, 6.5-4.5 or tiebreaker; another eight were 7-4 verdicts. That leaves only eight outcomes that could be described as in any way one-sided. Things were especially tight in the American division, whose teams were involved in three of the week’s four tiebreakers, five 6-5 results and three 6.5-4.5 games. Nothing was more emblematic of the wild week than this cool/cruel fact: the Badgers went 6-0, the Bammers went 0-6 . . . and their game against each other went to a tiebreaker. Of course when you look at the numbers, it’s easy to see how the line between victory and defeat could be so razor thin. All six AL teams finished in the 30s in runs, the totals ranging from 31 to 36. Four AL teams had RBI totals ranging from 31 to 35 . . . four posted a cluster of BR stats ranging from 1.11 to 1.19 . . . and, good grief, five American teams put up ERAs in the 2s, with a preposterously minuscule range of 2.52 to 2.70. The Badgers and the Moaners both came in at 2.68, necessitating some overtime calculations to determine that the Badgers had won the stat 2.679 to 2.683, a key moment in their 7-4 win over the M’s. . . . The Badgers’ 6-0 week took them to 15-4 on the season, tied for the best record in ball, and two games better than AL runners-up Zero’s. But pity the poor Bammers, who, it’s fair to say, suffered a major injustice by going 0-6 in a week when they totaled 35 runs, 33 RBIs, 33 TB, a 2.57 ERA and 1.11 BR ratio. It just don’t seem right. . . . Over in the National division, the Inmates’ block-rockin’ start cooled considerably, a 2-4 week dropping them from 13-0 to 15-4 and into a first-place tie with the Whiteskins, who went 5-1. And DamianUnited had a week almost as weird as the Bammers’, but in a good way. DamU’s offense produced a puny four HRs, 17 BI, 20 TB and .302 OBP, yet the team still went 5-1 on the strength of a pitching week that might be as good as any we’ll see all season – 1.12 ERA, 0.72 BR (!), .95 K-rate, 4-0, 6 saves. And naturally, of those five wins, one was by tiebreaker, two were by 6-5 and a fourth was 6.5-4.5. It was the only way to fly this week. . . . One final note: A moment of silence, please, for the Godfathers, whose inexplicably awful start extended to 0-19 with a third straight winless week.

SBL Notebook, Week 2

It was another jailbreak week for the mighty Inmates, who have leaped out of their cage and fired a shot across the collective bow of the SBL with a scorching 13-0 start. Just eyeballing the ’Mates’ hitting numbers these first two weeks, you might think they’d been playing full seven-day schedules while the rest of the league was playing half-weeks. Led by fast-starting Matt Kemp, David Ortiz, Ian Kinsler, Corey Hart, Alex Avila and others too numerous to mention, the Inmates' ball-busters mashed 11 HRs this week – bringing their two-week total to an astonishing 23 – and accumulated 36 runs, 34 TB and 33 RBIs . . . all in 174 plate appearances, fewer than all but three other teams in a truncated five-day schedule. All that offense papered over some truly gruesome pitching – it’s hard to envision any SBL team this season throwing up an ERA as bad as the 8.01 the Inmates just left splattered on the dugout wall – and kept the Mental Defectives unbeaten, with a three-game lead on the Whiteskins. And, good grief, look down there at the poor Godfathers, winless and already 13 games out of first place in the National Division – after TWO WEEKS! Things are more competitive in the American Division, where the Badgers went 5-2 to supplant one-week wonders the Moaners at the top of the heap – but at a mere 9-4, one game better than quick-recovering Zero’s (who went 6-1) and two up on the Moaners, who experienced a 1-6 stumble after their 6-0 start. . . . Statistically, only the Z’s (33 BI, 30 runs, 7 HRs) and the Puny Pontiffs (8 HRs, 33 BI, 32 runs) were able to hang out anywhere near the Inmates’ high-rent neighborhood in a semi-short week when the league average for PAs was about 50 to 60 shy of what a typical SBL team would get in a typical SBL week.

SBL Notebook, Week 1

First order of business: Don't nobody panic! Take a step back, breathe, and recognize that first-week results, as they might put it in Old Blighty, don't mean shite. A certain strain of SBL owner -- the more neurotic among our number, and they shall remain nameless here, but you/we know who you/we are -- tends to look at Week 1 numbers and let his imagination run wild, mentally extrapolating this small, isolated statistical sample into full-blown, ironclad, irreversible season-long trends -- like, if your 35-HR slugger from last year doesn't go yard at least once . . . or your star closer blows a save . . . or that staff ace you were counting on for 250 K's whiffs only five in seven innings . . . or, worst of all, if any or all of this results in an 0-6 or 1-5 start to the season -- well, that's it, then. It's over, you're doomed, all these clowns who underperformed in Week 1 are going to underperform to the exact same level in Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, and every single godforsaken week all the way through Week 26, and a 100-loss season is now absolutely, positively guaranteed. And your friends in the commissioner's office are here to tell ya . . . it just ain't so. If your boys stumbled out of the gate -- as the Bammers and the Godfathers just did, going 0-6 -- take heart, all is not lost. If you roared off the starting line -- as the Moaners and the Inmates just did, going 6-0 -- don't get cocky, there are 25 weeks to go and a lot can change. For evidence, we need go back only one year and look at 2011's Week 1 standings. A year ago, the Bammers and the Whiteskins sat atop the American and National division standings after scintillating 6-0 starts. By season's end those teams sat in fourth and last place, respectively, a combined 22 games under .500. Down at or near the bottom of those 2011 first-week standings we found the Cherry Valley Bombers, at 0-6, and the Zero's, at 1-5. Do we need to remind anyone who wound up winning the division pennants and meeting in the SBL Series? The Z's and CVBs would finish a combined 207-117, with the Bombers winning a close battle in the championship tilt. So, there you are -- the baseball season is a marathon, not a sprint, so everyone just chill. . . . It's also worth noting that last season began with an expected burst of offense, despite a severely truncated 3 1/2-day schedule, but then hitting numbers soon regressed and stayed flat for several weeks thereafter. This year, again, brought some surprisingly robust hitting to kick off the season -- but, just as a warning, don't be surprised if the lumber cools off in the coming weeks. Our little scheme to tweak the schedule -- splitting the first 11-12 days of the MLB season into two somewhat-shortened SBL weeks so as to return us to our traditional format with (almost) every stat week ending on a Sunday -- worked out just fine, for one week, anyway. Although we had what amounted to only about five full days' worth of games, plate appearances weren't too far off what we'd see in a normal week -- all but a couple of teams made it into the 200s, and the league average of 208 was only about 30 or so short of a full load. That's a fair and representative sample, we'd say. The league average of 7.25 homers was better than we've seen in some full-length weeks, and while there weren't many eye-popping RBI numbers, a handful of clubs made it into the 30s in runs and/or TB. The Inmates enjoyed a 12-HR, 36-run, 34-BI bash-fest, numbers that would hold up as category-winners in many a seven-day week.

SBL Notebook, Final

Corks are popping, the sparkling cider is flowing, and fireworks fill the air . . . Skyrockets in flight . . . afternoon delight . . . sorry, got sidetracked there for a moment. . . . As we were saying, the party is in full gallop at base camp below Mount San Gorgonio, where the Cherry Valley Bombers are celebrating their 2011 SBL championship. The fast-finishing Bombers rallied in the SBL Series to defeat the Zero's, 14-12 -- after first rallying in the wild-card playoff round to beat the Moaners by the same score -- to bring home their third league title, their first since 2003 . . . and, significantly, the first by a National division franchise since the Godfathers took the whole enchilada in 2004. The CVBs didn't set the world on fire in the early and middle innings of their postseason series, but then they closed like Mariano Rivera (or, to make this more appropriately Bomber-centric, John Axford), winning six of the last seven weeks in the wild-card round after trailing the M's 11-8, and then taking seven of the last eight weeks in the Series to wipe out an 11-7 deficit against the Z's. Thus did they complete one of the greatest single-season rags-to-riches sagas in SBL history. Six weeks into the campaign, the Bombers were dead in the water, and the National division race, sitting last in the standings with a 10-28 record, 16 games behind the division-leading Inmates. Then, beginning with the first week of interleague play, they got the wind in their sails, started winning and never really stopped, going 92-32 from weeks 7 through 26. And, typical of championship teams, they were at their very best when the games counted most, down the stretch -- going an incredible 40-4 over the last seven weeks to scramble from fifth place, eight games out, to first, six games ahead of runners-up Derek’s Derelicts at the finish line. Prodigious offense, a rare and precious commodity in baseball's nascent Era of the Pitcher, was what carried the CVBs during that crucial final stretch -- they averaged 12.6 HRs, 41.6 runs, 38.1 RBIs and 32.8 TBs per week in those frantic last seven weeks, with no OBP lower than .359 (and two that topped the magic .400 barrier). Their pitching was also stunningly good during that time, with five ERAs of 3.00 or lower and none higher than 3.44. No wonder they lost only four times in 44 games -- someday the owners of the Zero's, Moaners, Vic's Godfathers and the Batfaced Barristers will be able to tell their grandchildren about the year when they were the only SBL teams to register a victory against the Bombers during one of the most amazing closing runs ever seen. The rest of the NL hardly had a chance, though to their credit the Derelicts and Godfathers kept things close right to the end, delaying the CVBs' clinching until the final week in one of the more interesting races we've had in recent years. The Double-Ds and G-Daddies entered the final week tied for the NL wild-card lead, four games behind the Bombers, but the GDs blew a gasket in a 1-5 Week 26, while the 'Licts churned out a workmanlike 4-2 to capture the first playoff berth in franchise history.

The individual components that coalesced into championship fusion for the Bombers were, as these things often tend to be, quite impressive. Drafting out of the No. 10 spot, Dan nailed his first pick, Miguel Cabrera, who delivered a typical Miggy year (great OBP, boatloads of doubles and homers, triple-digits in runs and ribbies). Second-round pick Dan Uggla did what he was paid to do (hit home runs, 36 of them), and fourth-round selection Adrian Beltre exceeded expectations with, at age 32, the second-best year of his career -- 32 HRs, 105 BI, 33 doubles despite a six-week DL stint that limited him to 497 ABs. But, as also is often the case, it was the later picks, the sleepers, that put the CVBs over the top. Dan no doubt wishes he could’ve had do-overs on Jayson Werth (36th overall) and Alex Rios (63rd) – but did those minor drafting missteps even matter in the grand scheme? Jacoby Ellsbury (89th) did the work of two OFs, putting together a preposterously good six-category season (119 R, 105 BI, 32 HR, 46 2B, 39 SB, .376 OBP) that made him the Bombers' MVP and a serious contender for the real-world AL MVP. Alex Gordon had a breakthrough season (23 HR, 45 2Bs, 101 runs, 87 BI, 23 HR, 17 SBs) that far outstripped anything he’d done previously, and supplemental pickup Lance Berkman proved he had one more big year left in him at age 35 (31 HRs, 94 BI, 90 runs, .412 OBP in only 488 ABs) . . . and with an Ellsbury-Gordon-Berkman outfield, who the hell needed Jayson Werth, Alex Rios or Bobby Abreu (128th) anyway? Berkman wasn’t Dan’s only difference-making supplemental pick, either. Using the advantageous draft positions afforded by his team’s lackluster start, he added a 30-HR, 80-BI shortstop in J.J. Hardy, a solid fourth outfielder in Matt Joyce (19 HRs, 75 BI, 32 2Bs) and a serviceable DH in Carlos Pena, a Zero’s castoff who finished with 28 HRs and 80 BI. But perhaps the savviest pick Dan made -- the kind of pick that separates men from boys and champions from also-rans -- was his stealth selection of SP Javier Vazquez after Week 20. At the time of that draft the 35-year-old journeyman right-hander was 7-11 with a 4.67 ERA. But, as apparently no one but the Bombers GM noticed, Vazquez had strung together a month’s worth of solid outings; he’d just been pitching in hard luck. So Dan took a flier on him, and all Vazquez did in seven starts in CVB togs was go 6-0 with a 1.04 ERA, .71 BR and 1.02 K-rate – a significant statistical payoff that just happened to coincide with the Bombers’ season-ending hot streak. Vazquez’s excellent work rounded out a strong rotation anchored by NL Cy Young favorite Clayton Kershaw (21-5, 2.28 ERA, 1.06 K-rate, .98 WHIP) and AL rookie-of-the-year candidate Jeremy Hellickson (13-10, 2.95). The Bombers’ bullpen was more pedestrian, but the aforementioned Axford (46 saves, 1.95 ERA, 1.17 K-rate) kept them reasonably competitive in the RP-influenced stats. Put it all together and you have a complete, well-rounded team that was the SBL’s best . . . though, it should be said, not by all that much. The Zero’s nursed the league’s best record from Week 14 to season’s end (they finished with 105 wins, three more than the Bombers) -- they just couldn’t maintain that pace quite long enough, flattening out once they hit the “Heartbreak Hill” portion of the SBL marathon and going 28-22 the last seven weeks, giving the CVBs an opening they did not squander. And the Derelicts -- who also drafted very well and assembled a roster with many strengths and no glaring weaknesses -- were right there with both division champions, chasing the Bombers to the wire and then taking the Zero’s to overtime in the first round of the playoffs. Their series ended in a 13-13 tie, necessitating use of the old school mega-tiebreaker – one big ol’ game based on cumulative season totals in each of the 11 SBL stats . . . the method we used to determine the SBL champion before 1991. Paul won that 7-4 to advance to the Series.

The closely-contested postseason (two 14-12 series and one 13-13) was a fitting climax to one of the most competitively balanced seasons we’ve had in recent years, a season that saw seven teams remain in legitimate playoff contention into mid-September. And the fact that the National division pennant-winner emerged as champion . . . well, that seems somehow appropriate too. This was the season of the NL’s renaissance, when the senior circuit ended years of AL domination with a decisive 169-119 victory in the eight weeks of interleague play. Four NL teams – the Bombers, Derelicts, Godfathers and Inmates -- finished with winning records, and a fifth, DamianUnited, kept its nose above .500 until the final two weeks. Contrast this to the AL, where four of the six teams staggered home with losing records (when was the last time that happened . . . ever?) -- the Zero’s and Moaners combining for 203 victories, the rest of the division for 246. The level of competition was simply higher in the NL this year, meaning the Bombers and Derelicts probably survived a more intense crucible for their 102 and 96 wins, respectively, than the Z’s and M’s did for their 105 and 98. . . . Until last year, and DamU advanced to the championship round, the NL had not won a postseason series since we added the wild-card round before the 2006 season. But that worm, clearly, has turned. So, give it up for the NL.

Before we put the -30- on this season (for the whippersnappers in the audience, dash-30-dash is an archaic print-journalism term, dating from the days of hot type, meaning “end of story”), we offer our sincere thanks, as always, to statkeepers Paul Oberjuerge, Gregg Patton and Dan Evans for their dedicated, professional service, and to draftmeister Derek Rich, who orchestrated the 12 biweekly free-agent lotteries with the ease and assurance of a veteran (even if it was only his second year). And, of course, thanks to all for playing, and helping to maintain the spirit and tradition of one of the nation's oldest continuing fantasy baseball enterprises -- and (it can’t be said often enough), in our educated view the best game ever invented! Have a great off-season, and we'll see you, in person or via Skype, in March for the 2012 SBL draft.

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.

SBL Notebook, Week 24

Strange, sometimes, the way things go in the SBL. One week the National division race is as hot and heavy as Brangelina and the American division race is looking as dry and lifeless as a lunar landscape, and the next week everything is turned upside down. Now it's the NL pennant chase that's starting to look a little more like a foregone conclusion, and the AL race that has suddenly taken on a more up-for-grabs appearance. Could it really have been only two weeks ago that the NL standings featured a three-way deadlock at the top, with a fourth team only three games back? That's a true story . . . but as the Cherry Valley Bombers continue their late-summer rampage, and their pursuers struggle to keep up, the distance between hunted and hunters keeps growing. A second consecutive 6-0 week by the CVBs, combined with a 3-3 by the Derelicts and a 2-4 by the Godfathers, left the Bombers with a four-game bulge on the Double-Ds and six up on the G-Daddies, with only 13 games to play. Meanwhile, an AL race that stagnated for months as the Zero's maintained a death grip on the best record in ball has grown unexpectedly uncomfortable for the Z's, who went 2-4 while the runners-up Moaners cobbled together a second successive 6-0 week and crept to within three games of the top. The good news for the Zero's: They clinched a playoff berth (as did the Moaners), because the third-place Bammers went 0-6 for the second straight week and were eliminated from the postseason picture -- 17 games behind the Z's and 14 out of the wild-card spot occupied by the M's. The bad news for the Zero's: Their sustained period of mediocrity -- 17-20 over the last six weeks -- allowed the Moaners to hang around, staying close enough for their 12-0 mini-surge the last two weeks to make things interesting. The Zed's have been the BTIB since Week 14, enjoyed a season-best 13-game lead at the Week 18 milepost, were cruising with a nine-game advantage as recently as Week 22 and never led by fewer than seven in the nine weeks preceding this one. Now they may need to shake out of their doldrums fast or risk being overtaken at the wire. That, or hope that the Moaners experience a week in which their win-loss totals are more commensurate with their stat line. The M's, who took the scorched-earth route to their Week 23 perfecto, this week went 6-0 with what looked more like 2-4ish numbers. Not the first time that's happened this year, either. The M's were lights-out in two stats -- SBs and saves (8 of each) -- and pedestrian pretty much everywhere else. Nevertheless, 32 runs, 28 RBIs, 29 TB, a .308 OBP, 8 HRs, a 3.48 ERA, 1.23 BR ratio and 2-1 WL added up to two 6-5 wins, three 7-4 victories and another unblemished ledger, taking them past the 90-win threshold. All the earth-scorching in Week 24 was done by the Bombers, who've been doing a lot of that lately -- going 29-2 over the last five weeks to surge from eight games behind to four ahead. This week they once again made like the tripods in "War of the Worlds," vaporizing everything in their path with 53 TB, 43 runs, 43 BI, 12 HRs, a .397 OBP . . . and, as if that wasn't enough, a 1.49 ERA, .83 BR rate, 6-0 WL and five saves. That's league highs in seven stats and second-best totals in two others. No wonder they won four games by 10-1 scores and the other two by 9-2. If the CVBs had played the Moaners this week -- a game that might actually become reality in the playoffs -- it would have been Bombers 9, M's 2. As it was, both teams got to celebrate the same outcome, a 6-0 run. . . . In the bad news department, the Batfaced Barristers suffered their 100th defeat, joining the Puny Pontiffs in the Triple Digit Loss Club (the "good" news there -- no other team will be earning that dubious distinction this year). . . . Hard-luck award for the week goes to the Godfathers, whose numbers suggested something better than 2-4, but who were undone by two close (one of them excruciatingly so) tiebreaker losses. Still, the 'Daddies are only two games out of the NL wild card -- the closest race we've got going at the moment.

SBL Notebook: Week 23

"And then there were three." Besides being the title of perhaps the weakest album Genesis released in the 1970s (for those keeping score at home, their third LP after the departure of Peter Gabriel, and their first after lead guitarist Steve Hackett left the band, leaving only keyboardist Tony Banks, singer/drummer Phil Collins and bassist/rhythm guitarist Michael Rutherford to carry on . . . with a feeling-their-way transitional record before they bounced back a couple years later with the stronger "Duke" . . . ah, but we digress), that phrase more or less describes the current state of the riveting National division race -- which also appears to have been reduced from a quartet to a trio. The Cherry Valley Bombers continued their scorching-hot late-summer surge with a 6-0 week that took their record for the last four weeks to 23-2 and left them alone in first place. The Derelicts and the Godfathers each went 4-2 and are tied for second, two games back. But the Inmates -- who've spent more time (11 weeks) in first place than any other NL club this season -- suffered a second consecutive reversal of fortune, a 1-5 nose-dive piled atop last week's 0-7 crash-and-burn, and find themselves eight games out of first place and six out of the wild card. With only 19 left to play, that looks a lot more like a mountain than a molehill for the Mental Defectives to climb. . . . Meanwhile, the American division, which a week earlier had an ultra-tight wild-card affair going on -- a dead heat between the Moaners and the Bammers -- was reintroduced to the concept of wide-open spaces. The Moaners put together perhaps the most dominating week in the SBL this year, and although it moved them only two games closer to BTIB Zero's (who still lead by seven), it coincided with an unexpected 0-6 tailspin by the Bammers, who tumbled all-but-mathematically out of the division race, and six games behind the M's in the wild-card hunt. . . . The week was mostly about offense, and the Moaners certainly had their share of that -- league-leading totals of 51 RBIs and 12 HRs, plus 39 runs and 39 TB. But what really set them apart from the crowd, and turned all six of their games into blowouts, was some uncharacteristically strong pitching, from a team more accustomed to detonating stink bombs on the mound. For the first time all season they posted the week's lowest ERA, and though it was a fairly modest 2.66, in Moaner World it was something close to Shangri-La and Xanadu rolled into one -- only the team's fifth sub-3.00 ERA all season . . . as opposed to their 14 of 4.00 or higher. They also led the pack with 10 saves (second-highest total in the league in 2011) and posted the week's second-best BR stat (1.07) and K-rate (1.09). The result of all this: Two 11-0 whitewashes, three 10-1 victories and one 8.5-2.5 squeaker -- the latter coming against the Godfathers, the unlucky NL team that drew the short straw and had to play the M's in their best week of the season. . . . The CV Bombers were no slouches themselves in compiling Week 23's other unblemished ledger, combining massive offense (49 runs, 45 RBI, 10 HRs, .413 OBP) with decent pitching (3.00 ERA -- best in their division) to win six games without breaking a sweat (closest verdict: 7.5-3.5). . . . In general, it was a go-big-or-go-home week on the hitting side, with 12 teams combining to average 37 RBIs, 35.2 runs, 8.8 HRs and 29.4 TB -- perhaps the most productive week, top to bottom, we've seen in the league this year.

SBL Notebook: Week 22

Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, nuclear bombs . . . and, it turns out, the SBL, where the closer the races get, the better they look. With four weeks and 25 games to play, in fact, the National division race is so hotly contested, you have to avert your eyes to avoid having your retinas singed. The smoke from Week 22 cleared to reveal a three-way tie for first place among the Cherry Valley Bombers, the Derelicts and the Godfathers, all at 79-58, with the Inmates relegated to fourth place, three games back. And, while the American division pennant chase remained fairly one-sided, with the Zero's still nine games up despite a 2-5 week, the wild-card battle is now a dead heat between the Bammers and the Moaners -- also at 79-58. So, to recap: Four races, seven teams, five of them with the exact same record. Competitive balance, thy name is Sun Baseball League. . . . The Bombers' slow and steady ascension to the top spot (their 6-1 week earned them a first-among-equals listing in the NL standings), 20 weeks after their much-discussed-to-the-verge of excess 1-12 start, represents some kind of competitive-balance apotheosis: It means that each of the six NL teams has spent at least one week in first place this season. While the CVBs have been particularly warm of late (17-2 the last three weeks), consistency has been their true metier -- they haven't experienced a losing week since June (3-4 in Week 12), and have had only three of them since reaching their low point in relation to .500, 10-28 after Week 6. With the Derelicts (3-4), Godfathers (2-5) and Inmates (0-7) stumbling this week, the Bombers are the NL entry with the momentum, both short- and long-term -- they've been gaining ground steadily, damn near every week in fact, since Week 7 when they were at their low point in relation for first place, 17 games out. . . . In the AL, the Bammers returned to their season-long strength – unassailably hellacious pitching -- to go 5-2 and pull into a second-place tie with the Moaners, who revisited their season-long weakness – unambiguously horrendous pitching -- to go 1-6. . . . Elsewhere, the fifth-place team in each division made some noise. The Batfaced Barristers, 50 games under .500 when the week began, enjoyed a cleansing moment in the sun, combining solid offense (10 HRs, 37 RBIs, 35 runs, .428 OBP) with sensational pitching (1.84 ERA, .89 BR, 1.00 K-rate) to go 7-0, the week's only unblemished ledger. And ever-mercurial DamianUnited had another of those weeks, when just about everyone in the lineup started hitting and didn't stop. Eleven weeks after posting SBL season highs of 19 HRs and 62 RBIs -- and just one week after plunging to epic lows of 3 HRs, 15 BI and 17 runs, DamU monster-mashed to the tune of 18 HRs, 51 runs, 48 BI, 45 TB and a .393 OBP. Unfortunately for them, a dearth of speed (0 SBs) and quality pitching (4.98 ERA, .67 K-rate, 1 save) resulted in three losses despite all that offense.

SBL Notebook: Week 21

The National division race is tight enough to fry an egg on the sidewa . . . no wait, that should be "hot" enough. . . . Let's try, the National division race is tighter than a witch's . . . no, that should be "colder" . . . OK, the National division race is tighter than a piano wire. . . . sorry, it's best hackneyed, overused, unoriginal metaphor we could come up with on short notice. Suffice to say, the NL race couldn't be much closer if the four principals were quadruplets sharing the same womb -- the top three teams are separated by only one game, and the fourth-place entry is only four back. While the pacesetting Godfathers were dogpaddling to a 3-3 week, the surging Derelicts put together a second successive 6-0 to pull into a second-place tie with the Inmates (also 3-3), and the fourth-place Cherry Valley Bombers went 5-1 to pull within four games of the top. The Double-Ds have been an offensive force most of the season -- with big-ticket hitters like Adrian Gonzalez and Prince Fielder coming through as hoped, and less-heralded names like Jay Bruce, Hunter Pence, Mike Stanton and Jhonny Peralta exceeding expectations -- and of late their troublesome starting pitching has finally come around, led by the lefty likes of Ricky Romero and David Price. The 'Licts also have developed one of the SBL's strongest bullpens, anchored by the surprising Drew Storen and Brandon League and trade acquisition Jonathan Papelbon. Add it all up and you have a well-rounded team that appears to be in this for the long haul. The Derelicts' 2.13 ERA was the league's second-best this week (as was last week's 1.95), and they rang up the week's second-best HR (12) and RBI (43) totals, not to mention the No. 1 OBP (.385). The latter stat was fueled by what we believe to be a single-week league record of 40 walks . . . and THAT total was fueled by an outrageous 14 walks on Tuesday, which we're thinking has to be a one-day record as well. . . . The CVBs, meanwhile, continue to roll up big hitting numbers (43 runs, 12 HRs, 7 SBs, .381) behind the slugging likes of Miguel Cabrera, Dan Uggla, Jacoby Ellsbury, Lance Berkman, J.J. Hardy and Alex Gordon, complemented by a serviceable rotation anchored by Clayton Kershaw, Colby Lewis and Jeremy Hellickson. . . . There was also a detectable pulse in the American division race, for the first time in a while, as the Zero's -- still the Best Team In Ball by a comfortable margin at 86-44 -- remained stuck in neutral, posting a third consecutive 3-3 week -- and this time the runners-up Moaners were able to take a three-game bite out of the Z's formidable lead by churning out enough offense (13 HRs, 48 TB, 36 runs, 36 BI) to overcome their typically execrable pitching (4.54 ERA, 1.58 BR, .77 Ks). Still, the M's and the third-place Bammers (4-2) have a ways to go to make things truly exciting, trailing the Zero's by eight and 12 games, respectively, as we head into the home stretch, with 32 games left to play.

SBL Notebook: Week 20

Setting aside, just for a moment, the commissioner's hat and speaking as charter members of the American division, we can only tell the National division congratulations, well done . . . and enough, already! The NL completed an impressive interleague run with a 26-10 thrashing of the AL in Week 20, reaffirming the end of years of AL dominance in IL play. The Nationals finished the interleague portion of the schedule with a 169-119 advantage in games won, with the Americans having prevailed in only two of the eight IL weeks. This stands in stark contrast to trends of recent years -- particularly last season, when the AL went 183-105 in interleague play, the NL winning only one week (and by the slimmest of margins at that, 19-17 in Week 7) and, in Week 18, suffering one of the worst IL routs in SBL history, an almost all-American 34-2 blowout. This year AL teams were left wistfully longing for those halcyon days, after being steamrollered by the depth and strength of a National division with five legitimate pennant contenders. Week 20 was the cherry atop the NL sundae, as three of its representatives -- the Godfathers, the Derelicts and the Cherry Valley Bombers -- went 6-0, only one (DamianUnited) failed to at least break even, and no AL team posted a winning record. Those three unbeaten weeks, coupled with a stuck-in-neutral 3-3 by the Inmates, scrambled and tightened the NL race just a bit. The G-Daddies recaptured first place, a game ahead of the Mental Defectives, with the Double-Ds creeping to within four games of the top, the CVBs six back and DamU still within semi-striking distance, 10 games in arrears. The Bombers' recovery from a 1-12 start is an ongoing feel-good story in Cherry Valley; since those dark days of mid-April along the San Bernardino-Riverside county divide, the Bombers and the Godfathers have posted the best records in the division over the last 18 weeks, 67-44. But the G-Daddies were the most impressive story of this week -- they won all six games with relative ease thanks to league highs of 13 HRs and 7 SBS, plus 41 RBIs and 34 runs (damned efficient work, considering their .310 OBP), and, on the pitching side, the week's best ERA (1.40) and BR stat (.96). The Derelicts (42 runs, 11 HRs, .364, 1.95 ERA, six saves, 1.07 BR) were almost as strong in both disciplines, while the Bombers (12 HRs, 42 BIs, 6 SBs, .359) relied a little more on the offensive elements. . . . The AL race stayed static, with BTIB, the Zero's, going 3-3 for the second consecutive week (again, no AL team did better this week) and tearing another page off the calendar -- the Z's lead the Moaners by 11 games and the Bammers by 13, with only 38 to play.

SBL Notebook, Week 19

A contagion of bad pitching swept through the National division, opening a window of opportunity for the American division to actually win an interleague week, and for once the AL managed to scramble through it without breaking anything. Six of the seven worst Week 19 earned-run averages occurred in the NL, and that as much as anything explains the AL's 24-12 victory, its first in an interleague week since a 20-16 verdict way back in Week 7, the first of our eight IL weeks. It was just one of those odd weeks when even normally reliable starting pitchers like CC Sabathia, Johnny Cueto, Alexi Ogando, Ryan Vogelsong, Jeff Karstens and Tommy Hanson got knocked around -- and because all those and several other struggling moundsmen toil for National division clubs, the NL took the brunt of the damage, with five of its six teams posting ERAs of 4.20 or higher. (In a related development, six of the seven worst BR stats also were posted by NL teams.) The best ERA the division could put forward was a mediocre 3.76, and even that wasn't enough to help the second-place Godfathers avoid an 0-6 fate -- not that it cost them much in the standings, since the first-place Inmates could do no better than 1-5, keeping the G-Daddies within two games of the top. Meanwhile, the Derelicts (3-3), DamianUnited (5-1 -- the only winning week by an NL squad) and the Cherry Valley Bombers (3-3) all took advantage of the top two's struggles to bunch things up a bit in the standings, where none of the top five trails by more than eight games. There was also a modicum of movement in the AL race, where a 3-3 hiccup by the Zero's coincided with a 6-0 by the runners-up Moaners and a 5-1 by the third-place Bammers. That tightened the proceedings just a little . . . but not much, with the Moaners still trailing by 10 games and the Bammers 13 back. The Moaners parlayed solid-by-their-meager-standards pitching (3.40 ERA, 4-2, eight saves) and just enough offensive strength (10 HRs, 36 runs, .390 OBP, 7 SBs) into the only 6-0 mark of the week, while the Bammers' success was built on the week's best overall pitching (2.61 ERA, .97 BR, 1.10 K-rate, 4-1, 7 saves), the continuation of a season-long trend. . . . League-wide, offense continues to behave like the stock market, with last week's mega-high followed by this week's trough . . . although still nothing like the paltry numbers we've often seen this season. The league averages for HRs (7.75), runs (33.0) and RBIs (29.9) held in the "respectable" range, though TB (23.5) experienced a significant dip, and there was a smattering of shockingly low OBPs, including the Godfathers' .256 and the Inmates' .264.

SBL Notebook, Week 18

Suddenly the league awoke, as if from a dream, to find itself in another time, another place . . . say, around 1998, or 2003, or any year in between. We were back in the chicks-dig-the-longball era, and while the experience is sure to be ephemeral, it certainly was a glorious week, wasn't it? Twelve teams combined to smash 112 home runs, an average of 9.3 per team . . . and six teams reached double figures, the first time all season that half the league has made it to that promised land. Leading the way were the Moaners, whose 15 HRs came within a whisker or two of equaling their total for the previous THREE weeks combined. Then there were the Godfathers, with 13 . . . The Inmates and the Cherry Bombers with 12 each . . . The Zero's and DamianUnited with 10 apiece. This truly was a first-in-flight week for the SBL, at least by this year's modest standards. It wasn't just home runs, either; offense spiked pretty much across the board. The league averages for RBIs and runs were 35 per team, with five totals in the 40s . . . nine of the 12 teams reached the 30s in TB . . . half the league had OBPs of .349 or better. If you weren't hittin' this week, you may as well have stayed home. . . . This was also -- and this surely wasn't a coincidence -- probably the worst pitching week in the SBL this season, with not a single team recording an ERA in the 2s. There were four in the 5s, however; a couple in the 4s, and two more in the high 3s. . . . When the smoke had cleared, the National division had recorded another interleague victory, but at least the American division made it respectable this time, losing only 20-16. That counts as a moral victory for the battered AL, which has won only one of the six interleague weeks contested so far, and just last week got shellacked 28-8. . . . There was also a change at the top of the NL race, where the Inmates rode their Big Fat O (12 HRs, 46 BI, 36 TB, 36 runs, .377) to a 6-0 week that moved them back into first place, a game ahead of the Godfathers, who went 4-2. And, for now at least, those two have separated themselves from the NL pack, with the Derelicts, the Bombers and DamianUnited having dropped back by eight, 10 and 12 games, respectively. . . . The AL race was just more of the same, with the Zero's continuing to roll along without a care in the world, their 5-1 record this week taking them to an remarkable 33-4 in the last six weeks, and to 77-35 overall, keeping them comfortably ensconced as the Best Team In Ball. The Moaners also went 5-1 and hopped over the Bammers into second place . . . but remained a very distant 13 games out of first, with 50 left to play.

SBL Notebook, Week 17

It's tempting to declare this a no-harm no-foul week, but the truth of the matter is, there was a LOT of harm inflicted in Week 17 -- almost all of it administered by the National division and absorbed by the American division, whose constituents were left in a mood most foul. The Nationals, who decisively won the first interleague interlude (Weeks 7-10), began the second four-week IL period with their most dominant performance yet, walloping the Americans by a 28-8 count. Leading the NL onslaught were the ever-mercurial Whiteskins, the division cellar dwellers who, oddly enough, posted the only 6-0 record for the week, riding some outsized offense (49 TB, 44 RBI, 7 SBs) and lights-out pitching (2.35 ERA, 1.27 K-ratio). The no-harm no-foul part of the equation applies to the NL race -- because no team in the division went worse than 4-2, there was very little change in the standings, with the Godfathers maintaining their one-game lead over the Inmates, and the Derelicts, DamianUnited and the Cherry Valley Bombers bunched in third through fifth places, separated by only three games. The other division race, however, grew only more one-sided, because the Zero's, Best Team In Ball for nearly a month now, were the lone AL entry to survive the week with their dignity fully intact, losing only to JP in a 5-1 run that inflated their lead to 11 games over the Bammers -- whose 2-4 mark represented the best the rest of the division could muster. Elsewhere it was total mass humiliation -- the other four AL teams getting their collective clocks cleaned to the tune of a combined 1-23. Sheesh. . . . The NL was just too good everywhere you looked, mashing 55 HRs (a robust 9.2 per team) to the AL's puny 35; averaging an impressive 37 RBIs (to the AL's 28) and 33 TBs (to 28) per team; and posting four ERAs of 3.35 or better, no BR stat higher than 1.25 and no K-rate lower than .85. No NL team was less than good, and if they had been playing amongst themselves, it might've been downright cannibalistic. But facing the overmatched AL, it was simply a bloodbath. Better luck next week, Junior Circuit.

SBL Notebook, Week 16

What just happened? Here we had this nice little race going in the American division, we looked away for just a few seconds, and the Zero's turned around and hijacked the damn thing. The Z's kept on partying like it was 1999 on the offensive side of things, the Bammers were betrayed by their normally resolute pitching, and just like that, we saw a 7-0/0-7 swing that inflated the Zero's lead over the second-place Bammers from one game to eight. The Z's, almost alone among SBL teams, seemingly did not get the memo about this being the Era of the Pitcher, as they continue to mash like McGwire and Sosa and Bonds at their roid-ragin' peak. The Zero's slugged 11 home runs this week, to go with the 13 they launched last week and the 16 they pounded the week before that. They've also averaged 38 RBIs, 37 runs and, for good measure, 8 SBs in that three-week stretch. This isn't supposed to be happening in this diminished day and age, so we can only speculate that perhaps there is no PED testing in the United Arab Emirates, current home base for the Z's. Or maybe the UAE has been sucked into some giant time-warp vortex thing, causing the Z's hitters -- most notably Jose Bautista, Ryan Braun, Aramis Ramirez and Dustin Pedroia -- to believe and behave as though it’s 2001, not 2011. It took the Z's a little while to get going -- they were 7-12 after three weeks, at which point they already trailed the Bammers by 11 games -- but there's been no stopping them since during a 60-21 roll over the last 13 weeks that has carried them to the best record in ball (67-33), by an ever-widening margin. They’re 13-0 the last two weeks and 28-4 over the last five, during which time they’ve turned a nine-game deficit into an eight-game lead over the Bams . . . While the rise of the Zero's from near-worst to first in the AL (and the corresponding slide of the Bammers, who started 18-1) serves as a bracing reminder to avoid putting too much stock in early-season results, it is not the only rags-to-riches tale at work in the SBL this year. The National division has witnessed a similar recovery by the Cherry Valley Bombers, who broke last out of the gate at 3-16 through three weeks, but have steadily risen from the depths of despair to legit contention in the NL race. A league-high 15 HRs and league-low 1.14 ERA did the trick for them this week in a 6-1 performance (only the bad luck of having to face the Zero's prevented them from going 7-0) that lifted them above .500 for the first time all season, and to within eight games of the new NL front-runners, the Godfathers. (Side note: That makes 56 home runs in the last four weeks for the power-mad Bombers.) The G-Daddies also went 6-1 (losing only to the CVBs) and evicted the Inmates from the penthouse, where the Mental Defectives had resided since Week 11. The ’Mates trail by one game, then it’s five more back to the Derelicts and another two to the Bombers, who jumped over DamianUnited into fourth place. . . . And while we're on the subject of the CVBs’ rise to respectability, take a snapshot of this week's standings. The Bombers' ascension to 52-48 means that only three of our 12 teams currently sport losing records, and that's something you rarely see this far into the season, or at any point in any season. Speaks well for competitive balance, particularly in the NL, where any of five teams could win the division crown. Well done, everyone!