Opinion

Ruben Amaro must make an immediate, high-impact trade to salvage the Philadelphia Phillies' underwhelming season and his own reputation as a general manager.   The off season trade of Cliff Lee has upset many fans, and the team he has assembled is floundering, currently slightly over the .500 mark.  Furthermore, Amaro's attitude is not endearing fans.

After the announcement of Kendrick's demotion, The Philadelphia Inquirer 's Matt Gelb's posted this on his blog:

Obviously, we all know by now that the New York Mets have gone to the West Coast and failed to prove they are contenders.

On June 27, the Mets beat the Minnesota Twins behind Jon Niese on a Sunday at Citi Field. What's the relevance of that date? It's their recent high-water mark of the season, when they improved to 11 games over .500 with a record of 43-32.

Since then, they have lost 14 of 20, to drop to only three games over .500, with their current record being 49-46. The Mets were doing so well in the month of June.

The Minnesota Twins and Cleveland Indians just concluded a three game series at Target Field.

Some big issues were being made over the smallest of plays—the bunt.

It started in the first game of the series when Cleveland left fielder, Trevor Crowe, was at the plate. With two outs and nobody on base he had the audacity to bunt for hit.

Television color commentator Bert Blyleven and dugout reporter Roy Smalley both questioned Crowe's tactic. 

No, there is no talk of a new prospective owner of the Rangers moving the team to Cuba. But will the Rangers soon be a Cuban team?

The well-publicized bankruptcy of the Rangers becomes more of a headache with each passing day. Every day this situation goes unresolved is like throwing gasoline on a fire.

Once upon a time, Mark Teixeira was hitting below the Mendoza Line with little power and a lot of criticism. However, much has changed since May.

Teixeira is slowly turning his season around, producing the power numbers the Yankees expect, and need, in the middle of their order.

Although his average is still a bit too low (.256 entering Thursday), Texieira is on pace to finish with 30-plus home runs and 100-plus runs batted in.

An article was written in the Post and people have blogged about how, "If I were the Pirates, I would have to be blown away to trade away a Pirate pitcher." The Pirates have the third-worst ERA in baseball; no one is going to blow Pittsburgh away with a good trade to get one of its pitchers.

After splitting a two game series against the New York Yankees the Halos head to Texas for what could be the make or break point of their season.

With less than a half of a season to be played, little has been decided as far as the playoff picture goes.

As what has been a slow trade deadline season thus far starts to pick up, we will have a better idea of what teams will be playing in October and what teams are looking to the future.

So with so much baseball left to be played, here are 10 bold predictions on who will be playing in October and who will take home some of baseball's biggest awards, among other things.

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Welcome to Tribe Talk, where Bleacher Report's Cleveland Indians fans weigh in on the ups and downs of the club each week throughout the season.

This week, we discuss the Tribe's history of being a "second-half team," commend Jeanmar Gomez for his exceptional spot start, and agree that someone needs to tell David Huff he isn't allowed to use Twitter anymore. 

For some reason people feel closers should get some kind of leeway when they are simply not being good pitchers.

Coaches and players want to cite different years in which a closers' save totals were high, but when your job is to pitch one inning, your years can change with a couple hard hit balls.

In Bobby Jenks' case it's been many hard hit balls.

Closers can be created. After all, it's just pitching one inning for pitchers who, at one time, were pitching nine.