"It's nice, isn't it?" Cubs manager Lou Piniella said recently. "There's a lot of parity ... It's good for baseball, in a way."
How much has the middle class grown? Well, no team in the majors will either win or lose 100 games this year. According to Mike Emeigh, of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), this is only the third non-strike year since schedules were expanded to 162 games in 1961 that's happened. The others were 1992 and 2000.
Not only that, going into play last night there was still a slim chance that no NL team would even win 90 games.
The fewest games won by a league leader in the era of the longer schedule is 91 by the 1974 Orioles and 1983 Dodgers.
Whether this is an entirely good thing is open to debate. There's still something to be said for excellence.
Still, there's no question that having so many teams so close with so few games left this year has created a real buzz and a lot of excitement ... at least for everybody but the people on Park Avenue in New York who had to figure out how to break a possible five-way tie.
The hot corner
-- It's been reported that the Kansas City Royals will have an alternate, powder-blue home uniform top next season and that Tampa Bay will have a new color scheme, drop the "Devil" from their nickname and have only the new logo on the front of their road shirts.
-- It's been reported that the Kansas City Royals will have an alternate, powder-blue home uniform top next season and that Tampa Bay will have a new color scheme, drop the "Devil" from their nickname and have only the new logo on the front of their road shirts.
-- After 3 years of rumors, it appears that the Marlins will at least try to gauge the trade value of lefthander Dontrelle Willis this winter.
