4 MLB Teams Making The News Right Now
The 2017 MLB regular season is now underway and it has already delivered a few surprises to say the least. There have been close games and upsets. There have also been disappointing performances on individual and team levels. On the other hand quite a few teams and players have exceeded expectations and performed well. This is the beauty of Major League Baseball, you just don’t know what the season might throw at you.
The 2017 season is not even a month old yet but it has already gripped baseball fans all around the country. There are a lot of talking points to be discussed but there are four teams that are making the most headlines. They are the Los Angeles Dodgers, the Kansas City Royals, the Texas Rangers and the St. Louis Cardinals. All these 4 teams are making the news right now for different reasons and here we will take a close look at why that is the case:
It has been a disappointing start to the season by the Los Angeles Dodgers. They have won the NL West title in each of the last four season.s and were being picked by quite a few pundits to be the side that will go all the way to the World Series. On paper, the Dodgers have a very good squad but their performances this season haven’t been too great.
The Dodgers began their campaign by coming out on top against the San Diego Padres in their first game. They lost the next encounter but won the two that followed. The Dodgers then lost the series to the Rockies (1-2) and the Cubs (1-2). Then they came up against the Diamondbacks in a four game series and drew 2-2. Then most recently they faced the Rockies again and came up short 4-3 in the first game of the series.
The LA Dodgers are 7-8 right now and that is just not good enough for a team as good as them. Their Achilles heel of facing left handed pitchers have come back to haunt them again. This was their problem last season too and so far this season, the same problem has bothered them. Other teams know that the Dodgers have a problem facing southpaws and they are using their rotation sensibly to ensure that their lefties get to pitch against the Dodgers. The team from LA will have to do something about it if they are to go far this season.
The Kansas City Royals have gone through some good runs and some bad runs already in the first month of the 2017 MLB regular season. As everyone knows, the Royals lost to the Giants in the 2014 World Series but bounced back to win the next edition in 2015. They then failed to even make it to the postseason in 2016. 2017 was to be the season of the resurrection and well that looks pretty far off right now.
The Royals are 6-7 right now. They began their season with a 0-3 loss at the hands of the Minnesota Twins. They then won the three game series against the Astros 2-1 before losing the next series against the Athletics 1-2. The Royals then faced off against the Angels and won all three games of the series. Since they won their last game of the series against the Athletics, their winning run now stood at 4 games. That is where it ended when they squared-off against the Giants at home and lost the game.
The Royals had been hoping to get off to a good start and that would have given them the impetus to tackle the rest of the campaign. The good thing from their point of view is that it is only April and they have plenty of time to turn this around. They have done it in the past. In their World Series winning season of 2015, the Royals were under the .500 mark in July and we all know what happened next.
While the first month of the season does not really tell where a particular team will end up come the end of the season, it can still at times give teams a wakeup call or two. The same is true for the Texas Rangers. The Rangers won the AL West in 2015 and 2016. If you go back to the year 2010, they have been crowned division champions on four occasions and that is not too bad, is it?
But even after what they have achieved of late, especially in the last two years, there is a lot of skepticism surrounding them. While some people think the best they can do is win the AL West for the third straight time, there are others who think that the Rangers will not be able to even pull that off this time around.
Noone really gave the Rangers a chance to do what they did last season but they upset the odds to win the division championship. Do they have it in them to defy critics? Their early season form says no! The Rangers are 5-9 right now and that puts them right at the bottom of the AL West. On top of that, they made fewer additions to the roster than they subtracted from it. Sure, they have stars like Yu Darvish and Cole Hamels on the roster, but no disrespect to Rangers’ fans, there is not a lot to get excited about beyond that.
The thing with the Texas Rangers is that they are unpredictable and that generates headlines.
The St. Louis Cardinals have always been associated with success. This is a side that is among the most successful teams in Major League Baseball. That is also one of the biggest reasons they generate so many headlines when they falter. The current season is not even a month and already people are talking about the Cards and what has happened to them.
The St. Louis Cardinals are 5-9 right now and began their campaign with a series loss against the current World Series champions, the Chicago Cubs. That is despite winning the first game. They came up against the Reds next and lost the series 1-2. The Nationals beat them with the same scoreline before the Yankees compounded their misery by sweeping the Cardinals in the three game series.
The Cardinals were 3-9 at that point and it wasn’t looking good for them. Then they came up against the Pirates and won the first two games, the latest one being held on April 18, 2017.
Are the Cardinals that bad? Or is their form down to the fact that they have played a lot of very strong sides back to back. There is still plenty of time left in the season for them to turn this around. Their up and down form and how they will fare in the upcoming months has got a lot of people talking. The next few months are going to be very crucial for them but as is always the case, the Cardinals will continue to generate a lot of headlines all through the season.
All these 4 MLB teams have not started the season as well as they would have hoped for. Yes, there are other teams in the league that are not going great guns but right now these are the 4 sides that the people look to be talking about the most.
