Baseball

If the Cleveland Indians were a company on Wall Street, they would be looking for a bail out.

In business, as your company approaches the end of a quarter and earnings are set to report, often times you take an opportunity to perform a SWOT analysis.

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. 

This is a continuous improvement exercise. I don't think anyone would argue that after two and a half months, the Indians are desperately in need of improvement.

No doubt about it, the A.L. West is one of the worst divisions in baseball.  Good thing for Mariners fans: The M's are 2.5 games back in the division, trailing only the Rangers and Angels through the first half of the season. 

Fans cannot look at just the negatives surrounding the ball club. With the negatives there are also many positives following the Mariners into the second half of the season.

One of the many things going the Mariners way is their starting pitching.

As the Major League Baseball season is creeping towards the halfway point, division standings are becoming more important by the day.

With the mid-season hot stove heating up, here are 12 players that will likely be traded.
It's a possibillity that not all of these players will be traded, but its a safe bet that at least some of these players will be traded.
You probably won't agree with all my selections, and this slideshow is in no particular order.

Trevor Hoffman has received immense praise for his work this year, and rightfully so. He has 16 saves in 17 chances this year with a 1.31 ERA, and he is very likely to make a return trip to the All-Star game next month.

But Hoffman would attribute much of his success to four players that usually go largely unnoticed to most fans. Without the great play of Seth McClung, Todd Coffey, Mitch Stetter, and Mark DeFelice, the Brewers' season would have a much different feel than it currently does.

Maybe if the Marlins had not spent two weeks in first place fans would have a little more patience with manager Fredi Gonzalez.

Expectations were set high after the Marlins started the season five games up on their division opponents after two weeks. That lead disappeared quickly as the Marlins played like the Nationals for an entire month. Fans looked for someone to blame, and Fredi Gonzalez received much of it, but for good reason.

Even as the Marlins have climbed their way back into the thick of things I still have a problem with the way Gonzalez is managing.

Earlier this week, the Lakers NBA Championship moved me to put together a system to rank the best teams of the 2000s decade. While creating a list of the best, I also came up with a list of the worst.

For reasoning behind my methodology, see my article on the Top 10 Teams of the Decade (http://bleacherreport.com/articles/205182-the-top-10-teams-of-the-decade...).

Here is a quick recap of how the scoring works.

A team loses one point for every year they finished below .500 in the MLB, NFL and NBA, and for each non-playoff team in the NHL since there is not really a .500 mark.

I've written 22 articles on Bleacher Report in about 14 months on the site, and I just realized that I've never really stated what I thought about the A's. Obviously they're my favorite team, but I really haven't remarked on their state of affairs. Oddly enough, I've written articles on how bad (at the time) teams like San Francisco and Texas should change their rosters, but never the A's.

So here we are.

The closest thing on this site to breaking news, this is a story that I wrote for my paper about Justin Masterson, pitcher for the Boston Red Sox.

Boston Red Sox pitcher Justin Masterson, in Washington D.C. for a three-game series against the Nationals, was the featured speaker at the Pentagon's weekly prayer breakfast. Masterson spoke about how his faith affects him as a professional athlete and the impact God has had on his life.

To review part I, click here. To review part II, click here.

What the New York Mets achieved in 1969 was truly amazing and the world witnessed not only mans first steps on the moon but equally remarkable, the first World Championship by a National League team in New York in 14 years.