The Dodgers held a “Reopening Day” last night at their stadium, having been given permission by their state to pack the stands . Five EFL teams have apparently decided to hold their own celebration, jamming themselves into a space only 1.4 games wide in the standings, and reveling late into the night last night.
I am of two minds about this. My EFL Commissioner brain is happy to see EFL owners happy. I do grieve the Wolverines’ isolation from the party. The Commissioner doesn’t want anyone to be left out.
But my Wolverine Owner brain is content to spend a quiet evening at home at the top of the EFL hill, watching an episode of The Crown with my wife, and reading 2 1/2 of the four A.A. Milne books I found while cleaning the garage yesterday. I’ve finished When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six, and am halfway through Winnie the Pooh. It was a very pleasant evening, the light so late in the air, the view across the valley, with a glimpse of the far off Cascades…
Of course it might have been pleasanter if not for the noise of that party down the block.
EFL Standings for 2021
| EFL | ||||||
| TEAM | WINS | LOSSES | PCT. | GB | RS | RA |
| Old Detroit Wolverines | 50 | 19 | .727 | — | 405.6 | 248.3 |
| Flint Hill Tornadoes | 45 | 24 | .653 | 5.1 | 341.3 | 244.9 |
| D.C. Balk | 40 | 20 | .670 | 5.5 | 329.3 | 232.1 |
| Peshastin Pears | 44 | 24 | .648 | 5.6 | 321.1 | 239.3 |
| Kaline Drive | 45 | 25 | .644 | 5.6 | 363.2 | 269.9 |
| Haviland Dragons | 44 | 26 | .631 | 6.5 | 331.8 | 258.2 |
| Canberra Kangaroos | 36 | 24 | .597 | 9.9 | 318.8 | 265.5 |
| Pittsburgh Alleghenys | 37 | 31 | .542 | 12.8 | 338.3 | 311.0 |
| Cottage Cheese | 36 | 32 | .536 | 13.2 | 373.2 | 358.2 |
| Bellingham Cascades | 31 | 37 | .459 | 18.5 | 265.9 | 290.9 |
| Portland Rosebuds | 30 | 38 | .446 | 19.3 | 348.3 | 395.8 |
Old Detroit: W, 9 – 3. (48 PA, .297, .458, .432; 6.7 ip, 2 er, 2.69 ERA). Ross Stripling had one of his better starts of the year, doing all that pitching, and Josh Bell (2 for 3 with a homer and a walk) and Gavin Lux (2 for 4 with a walk) led the patient Wolverine offense (11 hits = 9 bb + 2 HBP). Every Wolverine not 100% on the bench reached base safely at least once, even Will Smith, who got a pinch-hit hit-by-pitch.
Flint Hill: “W”, 2 – 3. (40 PA, 243, .300, .378; 2.7 ip, 2 er, 6.67 ERA). The database heard Jamie’s prayers yesterday, especially the part bemoaning a “loss” yesterday when the score was 13 – 5, and gave him a small consolation today in a “W” while being outscored.
Today is Thursday, or so I’m told. On Tuesday morning the Flinties were 44 – 23, 0.5 games ahead of the 43 – 24 Tampa Bay Rays in our version of the AL East standings. We know the Rays really were 43.000 – 24.000 because MLB hasn’t learned its decimals yet, at least as applied to the standings. This means the Flinties’ REAL record Tuesday was somewhere between 43.501 – 23.499 and 43.549 – 23.451.
Later on Tuesday the Flinties beat their foes 13.0 – 5.4. Yesterday the supposedly 44 – 24 T’s led the 43 – 25 Rays by a reported 1.4 games. This tells us the Tornados had moved from just about the worst record that could round off to 44 – 23 to just about the best record that could round off 44 – 24 — something between 44.351 – 23.649 and 44.449 – 23.551. So the REAL record for the T’s on Tuesday was something like 0.9 – 0.1. Which is a very good record, befitting a 13 – 5 score.
The shock felt in Tornado’s front office was understandable, but its cause was nothing more nefarious than the imperfect educations of either MLB’s standings reporters, or their readers, which results in records perfectly rounding off to whole numbers.
Today the 45 – 24 Tornados are 2.1 games ahead of the 43 – 26 Rays, and (more importantly to every Flint Hill fan in existence) 3.1 ahead of the Red Sox. They lost 0.3 games to the Wolverines, but advanced a notch into second place.
DC: L, 5 – 6. (39 PA, .237, .256, .553; 6 ip, 4 er, 6.00 ERA). A rather poor day for DC, although
Xander Bogaerts
did his parts
in the Great Shortstop Race.
He gave them fits
with three hits
each reaching Second Base.
(Did I mention that the first two Milne books are entirely poetry? And there’s a bit more poetry in Winnie the Pooh. I guess I caught a little juvenile poetry bug last night.)
DC is still plagued by the Mets’ slow pace of play, leaving the Balk with up to 9 fewer games than other teams in the EFL. But they are making the most of what they’ve been given, leading those Mets by 5.2 games (0.2 games more than their rounded-off record shows). The Balk dropped 0.6 games to the Wolverines but still gained a spot in the standings…
Peshastin: W (-1), L 2; 3 – 15. (39 PA, .237, .256, .474; 16.3 ip, 16 er, 8.83 ERA) … because the Pears had a Very Bad Day. The hitting wasn’t Very Bad, just not great, with Ryan Mountcastle (a homer and two singles) and Shortstop Willi Castro (a homer and one single)(both acquired in a pre-season three-way trade involving the Pears, Cheese, and Wolverines) helping salvage something. But the pitchers… oh, the pitchers:
Well, not Freddy Peralta, he pitched fine (7 ip, 2er). But Justus Sheffield leaked 7 earned runs in only 5 innings, and Blake Snell chulked big: 3.3 ip, 7 er.
Blake Snell
Really smelled!
He just stank up the place.
Pears Fell!
You can tell
‘Most two games off the pace.
Pears’ hell
Hurt, they fell
Clear down into 4th place.
Kaline: “L”, 8 – 7. (44 PA, .366, .409, .512 — Happy Edgar Martinez Day!; 6.3 ip, 5 er, 7.14 ERA). Anytime your ERA is the size of Babe Ruth’s career home runs (divided by 100, of course), you’ve had a bad day. The Drive hitters actually made up for the bad pitching, especially pinch hitters Willy Adames and Wilmer Flores who combined to go 2 for 2 with a double and a homer, but the database still stuck an “L” on the day.
This left the Drive still in 5th place, but essentially tied with the Pears and only 0.1 games behind the 3rd place Balk, right in the thickest of the thickest part of the EFL standings.
Haviland: L, 2 – 4. (54 PA, .204, .204, .407; 8 ip, 3 er, 3.38 ERA) I could just tell you about the Dragons’ day — how they tried to make sure all 13 Haviland hitters could each Hav a hit, but they only had 11 to offer and Maikel Franco took two, so there weren’t enough and Joc Pederson, Jonah Heim and Gio Urshela didn’t get any hits. And how they couldn’t make up for that with walks and HBPs because no one bothered to order any of those. And how Ramon Laureano and Jake Cronenworth used their hits to get homers, or things would have been even worse.
Or I could tell you about the pitching, which was pretty good, with Skubal not quite as good (6 ip, 3 er) but Jose Alvarez much better (2 ip 0 er). But how it still wasn’t enough with ALL THOSE PLATE appearances, etc.
But there are really only two things to tell you. First, AA Milne published in 1927 a prescient poem about the Haviland EFL team in Now We Are Six:
Knight-in-Armor
Whenever I’m a shining Knight,
I buckle on my armour tight;
And then I look about for things,
Like Rushings-Out and Rescuings,
And Savings from the Dragon’s Lair,
And fighting all the Dragons there.
And sometimes when our fights begin,
I think I’ll let the Dragons win…
And then I think perhaps I won’t,
Because they’re Dragons, and I don’t.
Perhaps our league is just some six-year-old’s dream. It sure would explain a lot, including the Dragons’ up-and-down frustrations, and the otherwise inexplicable surge the Wolverines have gone on since Jamie published that fetching photo of a cuddly Wolverine (and the NYTimes simultaneously published a Letter Box with a secret message urging friendliness toward wolverines).
And second: the Dragons, despite their struggles, are still in the thick of things, maybe a little on the fringe but still in there.
Canberra: “W”, 2 – 3. (16 PA, .200, .250, .267; 2 ip, 0 er, 0.00 ERA) I said maybe the Dragons were on the fringe of the thick of things, but really, that’s the 7th place Kangaroos, who are now closer to the second-place Tornados than the T’s are to first place I worry about the Kangaroos, though. Sure, Clase and Karinchak might be the most dominant pair of relievers in the world. And Vladdy is big (to say the least) and strong.
But the box score isn’t. It’s a very skinny box score. The Kangaroos need strengthening.
Aha! I’ve put my finger on the problem. The Kangaroos are too much Roo and too little Kanga. If the Kanga part was a little more prominent it would make the Roo part take its medicine, etc. so it could better endure the heat in Colora… I mean, Canberra and not have to go sit down after only 16 PA and 2 IP.
Pittsburgh: W 2, L (-1); 11 – 2. (34 PA, .310, .412, .862; 3 ip, 0 er, 0.00 ERA). To be fair, the Allegheny pitching line is only one inning more robust than the Canberra one. But look at that batting! Four homers — two by Altuve, one by Shortstop Dansby Swanson, and one by Dominick Smith. Swanson added a triple, and there were two doubles –so 7 of the team’s 11 hits were for extra bases.
The A’s had the best day of any team in the EFL, the only team to gain on first place (0.4 games), and re-leap-frog the Cheese.
I know the Alleghenys are having their own private garage-cleaning project right now, except it isn’t a garage (it’s an office) and there are a LOT more books involved, even assuming there aren’t any 1920’s editions of Winnie-the-Pooh books among them. It would be swell if Mark was motivated to post stuff knocked loose in his head by something he finds.
Cottage: L. 5 – 7. (39 PA, .216, .256, .514; 1 ip, 2 er, 18.00 ERA). There’s a skinny pitching line for you, made skinnier, I’ll bet, in a panic when someone saw what a mess Michael Fulmer was making in his one inning. The Alleghenys emphasized slugging from the plate, accumulating 19 total bases from just 8 hits. Super shortstop Marcus Semien had one of the homers, of course (while his 6-hole partner Trea Turner was going a shocking 0 for 4), with Yandy Diaz and (of course) Shohei Ohtani collecting the others.
Bellingham: W, 4 – 1. (32 PA, .233, .281, .400; 11.3 ip, 3 er, 2.39 ERA). Ronald Acuna Jr blasted 2 doubles, singled, and was hit by a pitch in his 6 plate appearances, lending enough heft to the team batting to score 4 runs. It was more than enough, Tyler Mahle (6 ip, 1 er) and Anthony DeSclafani (5 ip, 1 er) stifled the opposition successfully.
The cellar is clearly no place for Cascades, it doesn’t even make sense. Having just escaped that awful place, the Cascades have no intentions of going back. Their next goal is to get above sea level. There are many mountain ranges under the ocean, but no one has never heard their names, and I’m guessing none of them are snow covered. I know none of them are visible from my porch up here atop the EFL hill. So being above sea-level is a Very Important Matter for the Cascades. Maybe by the end of the month?
Portland: “L”, 9 – 6. (35 PA, .375, .429, .719; 1.3 ip, 0 er). Wow — look at that Rosebud offense. Sometimes-shortstop Jorge Polanco led the way with two doubles, a single and a stolen base in 5 trips to the plate. Ryan Jeffers, CJ Cron, and Gary Sanchez added home runs to account for the rest of the team’s .719 slugging percentage. Toss in 1.3 scoreless innings by Trent Thornton, and you have an emphatic win for the Portlies.
Combined MLB + EFL Standings for 2021
| AL East | ||||
| TEAM | WINS | LOSSES | PCT. | GB |
| Old Detroit Wolverines | 50 | 19 | .727 | — |
| Flint Hill Tornadoes | 45 | 24 | .653 | 5.1 |
| Tampa Bay Rays | 43 | 26 | .623 | 7.2 |
| Boston Red Sox | 42 | 27 | .609 | 8.2 |
| New York Yankees | 35 | 32 | .522 | 14.2 |
| Toronto Blue Jays | 33 | 33 | .500 | 15.7 |
| Baltimore Orioles | 22 | 45 | .328 | 27.2 |
| NL East | ||||
| TEAM | WINS | LOSSES | PCT. | GB |
| D.C. Balk | 40 | 20 | .670 | — |
| Canberra Kangaroos | 36 | 24 | .597 | 4.4 |
| New York Mets | 35 | 25 | .583 | 5.2 |
| Philadelphia Phillies | 33 | 33 | .500 | 10.2 |
| Washington Nationals | 30 | 35 | .462 | 12.7 |
| Atlanta Braves | 30 | 35 | .462 | 12.7 |
| Miami Marlins | 29 | 39 | .426 | 15.2 |
| AL Central | ||||
| TEAM | WINS | LOSSES | PCT. | GB |
| Chicago White Sox | 43 | 25 | .632 | — |
| Cleveland Indians | 37 | 28 | .569 | 4.5 |
| Pittsburgh Alleghenys | 37 | 31 | .542 | 6.1 |
| Bellingham Cascades | 31 | 37 | .459 | 11.8 |
| Kansas City Royals | 30 | 37 | .448 | 12.5 |
| Detroit Tigers | 29 | 39 | .426 | 14 |
| Minnesota Twins | 27 | 41 | .397 | 16 |
| NL Central | ||||
| TEAM | WINS | LOSSES | PCT. | GB |
| Milwaukee Brewers | 38 | 30 | .559 | — |
| Chicago Cubs | 38 | 30 | .559 | — |
| Cottage Cheese | 36 | 32 | .536 | 1.6 |
| Cincinnati Reds | 35 | 31 | .530 | 2 |
| St. Louis Cardinals | 35 | 33 | .515 | 3 |
| Pittsburgh Pirates | 23 | 44 | .343 | 14.5 |
| AL West | ||||
| TEAM | WINS | LOSSES | PCT. | GB |
| Kaline Drive | 45 | 25 | .644 | — |
| Haviland Dragons | 44 | 26 | .631 | 0.9 |
| Oakland A’s | 43 | 27 | .614 | 2.1 |
| Houston Astros | 39 | 28 | .582 | 4.6 |
| Seattle Mariners | 34 | 36 | .486 | 11.1 |
| Los Angeles Angels | 33 | 35 | .485 | 11.1 |
| Texas Rangers | 25 | 43 | .368 | 19.1 |
| NL West | ||||
| TEAM | WINS | LOSSES | PCT. | GB |
| Peshastin Pears | 44 | 24 | .648 | — |
| San Francisco Giants | 43 | 25 | .632 | 1.1 |
| Los Angeles Dodgers | 41 | 27 | .603 | 3.1 |
| San Diego Padres | 38 | 32 | .543 | 7.1 |
| Portland Rosebuds | 30 | 38 | .446 | 13.7 |
| Colorado Rockies | 28 | 41 | .406 | 16.6 |
| Arizona Diamondbacks | 20 | 49 | .290 | 24.6 |
Kaline: “L”, 8 – 7. Haviland: L, 2 – 4. Canberra: “W”, 2 – 3. Pittsburgh: W 2, L (-1); 11 – 2. Cottage: L. 5 – 7. Bellingham: W, 4 – 1. Portland: “L”, 9 – 6.
Combined MLB + EFL Standings for 2021
| AL East | ||||
| TEAM | WINS | LOSSES | PCT. | GB |
| Old Detroit Wolverines | 50 | 19 | .727 | — |
| Flint Hill Tornadoes | 45 | 24 | .653 | 5.1 |
| Tampa Bay Rays | 43 | 26 | .623 | 7.2 |
| Boston Red Sox | 42 | 27 | .609 | 8.2 |
| New York Yankees | 35 | 32 | .522 | 14.2 |
| Toronto Blue Jays | 33 | 33 | .500 | 15.7 |
| Baltimore Orioles | 22 | 45 | .328 | 27.2 |
| NL East | ||||
| TEAM | WINS | LOSSES | PCT. | GB |
| D.C. Balk | 40 | 20 | .670 | — |
| Canberra Kangaroos | 36 | 24 | .597 | 4.4 |
| New York Mets | 35 | 25 | .583 | 5.2 |
| Philadelphia Phillies | 33 | 33 | .500 | 10.2 |
| Washington Nationals | 30 | 35 | .462 | 12.7 |
| Atlanta Braves | 30 | 35 | .462 | 12.7 |
| Miami Marlins | 29 | 39 | .426 | 15.2 |
| AL Central | ||||
| TEAM | WINS | LOSSES | PCT. | GB |
| Chicago White Sox | 43 | 25 | .632 | — |
| Cleveland Indians | 37 | 28 | .569 | 4.5 |
| Pittsburgh Alleghenys | 37 | 31 | .542 | 6.1 |
| Bellingham Cascades | 31 | 37 | .459 | 11.8 |
| Kansas City Royals | 30 | 37 | .448 | 12.5 |
| Detroit Tigers | 29 | 39 | .426 | 14 |
| Minnesota Twins | 27 | 41 | .397 | 16 |
| NL Central | ||||
| TEAM | WINS | LOSSES | PCT. | GB |
| Milwaukee Brewers | 38 | 30 | .559 | — |
| Chicago Cubs | 38 | 30 | .559 | — |
| Cottage Cheese | 36 | 32 | .536 | 1.6 |
| Cincinnati Reds | 35 | 31 | .530 | 2 |
| St. Louis Cardinals | 35 | 33 | .515 | 3 |
| Pittsburgh Pirates | 23 | 44 | .343 | 14.5 |
| AL West | ||||
| TEAM | WINS | LOSSES | PCT. | GB |
| Kaline Drive | 45 | 25 | .644 | — |
| Haviland Dragons | 44 | 26 | .631 | 0.9 |
| Oakland A’s | 43 | 27 | .614 | 2.1 |
| Houston Astros | 39 | 28 | .582 | 4.6 |
| Seattle Mariners | 34 | 36 | .486 | 11.1 |
| Los Angeles Angels | 33 | 35 | .485 | 11.1 |
| Texas Rangers | 25 | 43 | .368 | 19.1 |
| NL West | ||||
| TEAM | WINS | LOSSES | PCT. | GB |
| Peshastin Pears | 44 | 24 | .648 | — |
| San Francisco Giants | 43 | 25 | .632 | 1.1 |
| Los Angeles Dodgers | 41 | 27 | .603 | 3.1 |
| San Diego Padres | 38 | 32 | .543 | 7.1 |
| Portland Rosebuds | 30 | 38 | .446 | 13.7 |
| Colorado Rockies | 28 | 41 | .406 | 16.6 |
| Arizona Diamondbacks | 20 | 49 | .290 | 24.6 |