The Blue Workhorse

In 2005, the Chicago White Sox walked away as World Series champions after sweeping the Houston Astros. The following season, the Detroit Tigers fell to the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. Then last year, the Cleveland Indians fell in the ALCS to the eventual champs, the Boston Red Sox.

This season, however, hope abounds for each of the division rivals in the American League Central. The Indians look to move past the championship series for the first time since 1995 and are hoping they can get a World Series title on the 60 year anniversary of their last title in 1948.

Detroit, who was the pre-season pick of several analysts to win the World Series, now will have to dig themselves out of an 0-6 start to their season if they want to make it back to the promised land of the October (now partly November) Classic. The White Sox just finished off a sweep of the Tigers and are hoping a rejuvenation to the heart of their lineup can return them to the 90 win plateau they have abandoned the past two seasons.

Opening Day is one of the most glorious days in sports, despite the fact that MLB tried to ruin it by having an opening series in Japan and then by having a one game series (yea, that’s not even possible Major League Baseball - a series means multiple) in Washington.

Now that all the teams and players have each put on the uniform for the first official games of the season, and to honor the first true day of the MLB schedule, we make initial observations on every team about what we saw on Opening Day after watching some games and examining boxscores:

Thankfully for the Seattle Mariners, when they lost 15 of their last 17 games last season and ran themselves out of a possible playoff berth, they were overlooked because a team in New York was having an even more colossal collapse. After all was said and done, the M’s ended up 6 games behind the division champ Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, or whatever they want to call themselves.

This offseason Seattle made sure they had a pitching staff that wouldn’t be able to go through the rotation more than 3 times with only two wins. They traded for Erik Bedard and Carlos Silva to bolster their pitching staff. However, LAA of A also made significant moves in the off-season by signing free agent Torii Hunter and trading away Orlando Cabrera to strengthen their starting rotation with Jon Garland.