## Standings / Recap / Comments
Code:
LEAGUE STANDINGS EAST
Team W L WPct GB R RA
Detroit Tigers 8 3 .727 - 40 16
Boston Red Sox 7 4 .636 1 37 27
Baltimore Orioles 8 5 .615 1 46 42
Cleveland Indians 6 6 .500 2½ 53 50
New York Yankees 4 8 .333 4½ 27 43
Milwaukee Brewers 3 7 .300 4½ 27 40
LEAGUE STANDINGS WEST
Team W L WPct GB R RA
Oakland Athletics 8 3 .727 - 49 35
Minnesota Twins 7 4 .636 1 47 33
California Angels 7 6 .538 2 31 38
Chicago White Sox 5 8 .385 4 36 44
Kansas City Royals 5 9 .357 4½ 37 49
Texas Rangers 4 9 .308 5 17 30
Code:
LEAGUE STANDINGS EAST
Team W L WPct GB R RA
Pittsburgh Pirates 10 3 .769 - 50 21
Chicago Cubs 10 4 .714 ½ 44 40
St. Louis Cardinals 8 5 .615 2 69 41
Philadelphia Phillies 7 7 .500 3½ 55 59
New York Mets 5 7 .417 4½ 45 48
Montreal Expos 2 11 .154 8 30 71
LEAGUE STANDINGS WEST
Team W L WPct GB R RA
Atlanta Braves 10 5 .667 - 69 56
San Francisco Giants 10 6 .625 ½ 54 37
Houston Astros 7 7 .500 2½ 37 45
San Diego Padres 7 9 .438 3½ 57 74
Los Angeles Dodgers 6 9 .400 4 45 65
Cincinnati Reds 2 11 .154 7 52 50
And we're finished with the abbreviated April! Offense is starting to pick up, which, I admit, I re-adjusted the LTMs based on the games played. The NL is now all the way up to a 3.30 ERA but the AL is still well under 3 so I think they'll probably just balance out over time. I just didn't really want a second 1968 (even though in reality '72 was kind of close, albeit without the 31 wins or 1.12 ERAs) (TBF though this was the year Steve Carlton went 27-10 for a horrible Phillies team, and for that matter Gaylord Perry and Wilbur Wood went 24-16 and 24-17, respectively. Both Carlton and Perry had sub-3 ERAs. Point being, there was plenty of big pitching to go around). Anyway, things should still be pretty low-offense, just maybe hovering around the low 3s in ERA instead of 2.80; that also means, hopefully, fewer 2-1 games that go 15 innings because neither team can generate anything in the way of offense.
But the actual baseball, the actual baseball! The White Sox' young star Alice Cooper (.227, 5, 12) leads the AL in HRs and RBIs, although the Indians' Ernesto Garcia (.407, 3, 10) is catching up after missing the first five games with a suspension. Boston's Justin Kindberg (2-1, 1.50) is coming off of his 27-win 1971 with 27 Ks in 30 IP; he's looking like the early Cy Young choice in the AL. We also have 3 players - Boston's RF Tom Brown (.405, 3, 10), Oakland's RF Richard Berman (.400, 1, 7), and his teammate SS Matt Evenson (.400, 2, 11) - hitting .400. Not that they'll keep that up with a league projected to hit in the .240s but you do love to see it!
On the NL side of things, the Giants are 10-1 since losing their first 5 games of the season and so are at the top of the heap in the early West race. The Pirates are leading the East thanks to not allowing anything in the way of runs. And Montreal and Cincy are reeeeally bad to open up (although the Reds have a positive FUN differential thanks to a 15-0 drubbing of the Cubs this week). Nothing's suuuper standing out individually outside of St. Louis's Roger Quintana (2-0, 2.18) pulling a reverse Steve Carlton with 29 Ks in 33 IP to date (he played with the Phillies last year and is even a lefty!). Mets 1B Joshua Waltenbery (.370, 2, 10) is just barely ahead of Houston OF Big George Foreman (.364, 1, 5) in the batting race, and Cards RF Casey Satterfield (.333, 4, 13) held down the fort while Lorenzo Martinez was away with an injury (he still has 3 days left) and might have earned himself a Hitter of the Month award in the process.
## Major Transactions
April 28: The Yankees purchased minor league P Chris Allen (1-1, 4.35 in the majors in 1971) for $5,000. Allen gives the Yankees a second lefty out of the bullpen to complement Roy Holm and the A's get out from underneath a known locker room talker outer.
## News
April 24: (real life) Chipper Jones, future Hall of Fame third sacker for the Braves (which probably means he'll be a middle reliever in this game), was born in DeLand, Florida.
April 24: Year of the Pitcher II won't be the Year of the Pitcher for everyone, it seems. Padres SP Alfredo Lopez (0-1, 4.91) will miss the entire season and, as he's 38, maybe end his career after suffering a torn flexor tendon in his elbow. Lopez has had issues staying healthy the last couple years, him being in his late 30s and all, and, if his career is done, he ends just short of 100 wins with a 97-90 record and a 3.15 ERA.
April 24: 36 year old Indians reliever Eddie Sanchez (2-2, 4.72 last year) told me he's going to accept a job with NBC next season and so this year will be his last. I guess NBC has a requirement for middle relief men too. Huh.
April 24: The very first AL Player of the Week award goes to Kansas City Royals OF RJ Dominguez (.276, 4, 7), who went .350 last week with all 4 of his HRs and all 7 of his RBIs. Dominguez is 27 and this is his 2nd PotW; he won his first last may. He was also an All-Star last year and the AL Silver Slugger in RF; he's now got himself a nice little collection of hardware.
April 24: Somehow hitters won both of these awards: in the NL it goes to Braves leadoff man and LF Chris Ward (.393, 1, 3). Ward missed the first 3 games of the season but still got 11 hits in his first 28 at-bats, stole 2 bases, had 4 extra base hits, and scored 6 times. This was, amazingly enough (to me!), Ward's very first PotW award and now he gets that 1972 Braves uniform immortalized FOREVER. You only see the hat but even that hat looks 1972.
April 25: Edwin H. Land of the Polaroid Corporation introuduces the SX-70 film and camera and photographs that develop "right before your eyes".
April 25: Cleveland goes way against the grain and pounds the White Sox for 8 runs in the 8th inning en route to a 12-2 win. The inning, which saw 3 Chicago pitchers, was extended twice by bad errors, including one by 2B Chance Hopka (.250, 0, 3) playing out of position at shortstop (to be fair to Hopka, he's actually played more shortstop - 444 games - than 2nd - 162 games - in his career). RF Tommy Pron (.429, 0, 4) went 3 for 6 with 2 runs and 2 RBIs for the victors, who even their record up at 4-4 with this one.
April 26: Some good news on the injury front for somebody, at least: Cubs 2B Juan Perez (.248, 6, 27 in 1971), who successfully fought off a challenge from Manuel Lozano (.129, 0, 0) only to sprain his ankle at the end of spring training, is recovering well from the injury and should be ready to come back some time next week. The Cubs, in spite of Lozano, have gotten off to a nice 7-3 start, built off of a weirdly good starting rotation that's carrying a 1.85 ERA so far.
April 26: Meanwhile in New York City, the news is bad: Mets SP John Mash (0-0, 1.35), who was pulled early from a game 3 days ago complaining of tenderness in his leg, will miss the next month with a hamstring strain. The 35 year old was looking to come back from a tough 9-18, 3.94 season that saw his K rate dip to 4.8/9 innings. Mike O'Leary (1-0, 5.48 in 1971), who was a reliever for the Dodgers in 1969 and 1970 before being used as a starter in the Cardinals' organization last year, will take his place in the rotation... for now.
April 27: Embattled West German chancellor Willy Brandt, accused by his detractors of being soft on communism, faces a "constructive vote of no confidence" (I won't bother to put the German in here but it is of course only 2 words) that would permit the German parliament (the Bundestag) to remove him. The vote requires a simple majority of the 498 members and fails by 2.
April 27: Edmund S. Muskie announces that he's dropping out of the race for the Democratic Party nomination for President amid charges that he's too emotional to handle the job. In late February he'd given a speech to supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire during a snowstorm that made it appear that he was crying. The press duly reported that he'd broken down and cried during this. Although he was the early front-runner his campaign never really recovered from this (which, as it will turn out later, was spun this way as part of Richard Nixon's "dirty tricks" campaign).
April 28: An astronomer with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announces the possibility of a tenth planet based on calculations of gravitational data. Unlike Pluto, this one would have been larger than Saturn. The possibility will be ruled out after further study.
April 28: In spite of sitting him, Dodgers 2B Danny Fager's (.583, 0, 1) strained Achilles tendon has gotten worse and now it's unclear when he'll be ready to go. As the Dodgers are sitting at 4-8 and not expected to do a lot, I'm just going to go ahead and banish him to the DL, which the league is kind enough to backdate to the 26th. Last year's starting SS Luis Solis (.208, 1, 2 at AAA Albuquerque) is called up to replace the spot on the roster although Francisco Pena (.342, 0, 2) made this an easy decision given the way he's hitting right now (and he'll continue to start).
April 28: Reds C Oliver Williams (.214, 2, 5) went 3 for 6 with 2 HRs and 4 RBIs from the 8 hole, snapping a season-long slump and helping lead Cincinnati to an easy, easy 15-0 win over the Cubs in Wrigley Field. Steve Waiters (1-2, 1.82) really didn't need to go the whole way, especially not after a 7 run 8th put the game out of reach, but on the other hand he almost threw a Maddux, finishing with 103 pitches on 2 hits, 1 walk, and 9 strikeouts. "I'm not ever going to complain about support," said Waiters after the game. Prior to this, the 2-9 Reds had scored 31 runs over their first 10 games (which is actually kind of close to the average in this horribly low-offense year). Two Cubs errors committed heavily to the onslaught; 10 of the 15 runs Chicago allowed were scored as unearned.
April 29: An uprising in Burundi by the Hutu people against the Tutsi-dominated government began with machete attacks that killed more than 3,000 Tutsi civilians and soldiers. In the words of one observer, "the ferocity of the ensuing repression by the army was beyond imagination", with more thna 100,00 Hutus being massacred over the next five months. In the following genocide, educated Hutu people were murdered, "especially anyone wearing glasses".
April 30: Arthur Godfrey ends his broadcasting career with the final show of his CBS Radio Network program, "Arthur Godfrey Time", which had run since 1945.
## Teams in Review
Still too early!