David Blaine Magic (& baseball/Yanks/Bosox hijack!)

[Bosox1]

[Jarren]

[Xaston]

[Allstar7]

[Jarren]

[Felonius_Monk]

[Bosox1]

[laynegt]

[The Golden 1]

[shamdonk]

I am not going to create a giant post because I know it will get ugly and I will create the biggest rant. ALLLL I have to say is the first thing the sox did that made me so angry in quite some time was not resigning orlando cabrera. I thought he was fucking awesome and granted renteria is probably better and just had some variance... but man cabrera was cheap, great glove, pretty good bat, and did I say cheap?

Also brunson got bad beated so hard it pissed me off; one guy in this money driven business who proves he is a class act and gets bent over a barrel.

As for the whole damon/coco nonsense.........MEH

[Felonius_Monk]

Arroyo kinda had the last laugh though, had a pretty decent season whilst the Sox were crying out for starting pitching all year.... I can't even remember who was in the 4 and 5 spots in the rotation in September but if I remember it was pretty ugly

[shamdonk]

ummm he was pitching the the AAAA

[The Golden 1]

Going from the AL to the NL and vice versa is a much bigger deal than people make it out to be.

See Bronson Arroyo, Pedro Martinez, hell Jeff Suppan for that matter. Pitchers that go from the AL to the NL usually are much more impressive.

On the other side of the coin are the NL to Al hitters. See Richie Sexson, Adrian Beltre, Edgar Renteria, etc. For the most part it is very difficult for an NL hitter to adjust to AL pitching quickly or possibly at all. Exceptions are there like Jim Thome, but for the most part it seems to be pretty difficult.

[Felonius_Monk]

Martinez was more impressive in the AL. Thome is a pretty big exception; he's HUGE for Chicago. Not a lot of marquee NL players have moved to the AL so it's hard to go on examples like Renteria, who's been WAY up and down throughout his career anyhow. I think the sample size of dominant batters who've moved between the leagues in recent years is reasonably small. Abreu's hit better for the Yankees this year after moving from NL Philly. I think really dominant hitters can hit anywhere - if Howard, Berkman or Pujols played for an AL team they'd still be dominant players; equally if Carpenter, Maddux, Oswalt, whoever, pitched in the AL they'd still be good pitchers. I think the best players will be stars anywhere, but yeah maybe lower level guys like Suppan have more of a chance of performing in a league that has fewer great offensive teams...

Though in general I think it's quite clear that the pitching (and standard in general) in the AL is much better....

[Felonius_Monk]

As for Beltre, he's had the second best year of his career this season... He had one mega hot year for the Dodgers in 2004 but that was way up on his career before that, then one shoddy year at Seattle and then put up better numbers this year - his 2006 record is about on a par for his career average, maybe he just had one out of this world year in 2004 that was a bit of an anomaly? It wasn't like he'd lit up the NL for 8 years and been one of the game's biggest stars or anything...

And Sexson's had two good years in Seattle so I'm not sure what he's done wrong in the AL. I don't really think he's struggled in the AL compared to the NL at all.

I don't think too much of your examples really .... I'm guessing you're a Mariners fan given those three guys but I think if you look at what they did in the NL, even though your boys had an ugly year, individually they've not been any worse against AL pitchers than they were in the NL.