MLB: After the All Star Break; "Standings & The Rest of the Season" // NBA: (Revised:) "How About those Superstars?"; Dreams & Fears."

sports-notebook.blogspot.com . . . FOR MORE ANALYSIS, GO TO "MILE HIGH SPORTS RADIO," AM1510 or FM93.7, and to Denver’s best sports blogging team---milehighsports.com. SPORTS NOTEBOOK posts its columns Tuesday and Friday of each week. Ed., Publ., Marvin Leibstone; Copy & Mng. Ed., Gail Kleiner. . . //. . .MLB: AFTER THE ALL STAR BREAK; "Standings & The Rest of the Season // NBA “STANDINGS & THE REST OF THE SEASON” // NBA: (In case you missed these, slightly revised--) “HOW ABOUT THOSE SUPERSTARS?”. . “DREAMS & FEARS” . . . //. . MLB---IT’s not quite crunch time but we’re more than halfway through a baseball season, at a sharp turn when some MLB teams re-set their sights for goals a lot more achievable than those they decided to go for in April. Right now, 12 franchises have won more than 50 of 162 games that each MLB team plays during regulation. That’s less than a third of the 162, another way of saying that the 12 have lost from 36 games, as have the AL West’s Oakland A’s, up to the 44 games lost by the NL Central’s St. Louis Cardinals and also by the AL West’s Seattle Mariners. Noteworthy is that 10 of these teams with more than 50 wins are holding either first or second place positions within their respective divisions and only one of the second place clubs is more than four games behind first place, the AL Central’s K.C. Royals being six back of the 53-38 Detroit Tigers. The rest are but one or two games back. The two other clubs of 50+ wins are third place holders, and only one and two games behind first in their divisions. This tells us that as mid-summer approaches, nearly half of the 30 major league clubs still have a shot at post season selection as their division’s number one team Of these, the best lead belongs now to the Tigers and their six games ahead of the Royals, while the top team in either league, the AL West’s 59-36 A’s, are ahead of second place L.A. Angels by only one game. Of teams probably lowering their sights out of necessity, the AL East’s Boston Red Sox stand out, in that last year they won the WS. The Red Sox are now 43-52/.453, last place, nine games back of division leading team, the 52-42 Baltimore Orioles, a proper goal for the Red Sox being a grab at .500 and holding on. And, the same objective seems appropriate for another team that finished well last year, the now AL West’s 38-57/.400 Texas Rangers, last place and 10 games behind the A’s. The Rangers are now worst in the MLB, behind the two clubs usually holding the keys to baseball’s dark dungeon, the AL West’s 40-56 Houston Astros and the NL Central’s 40-54 Chicago Cubs. . . USING number of won games as the indicator, were the WS being held today it would be the AL’s A’s vs. the NL West’s 54-43 L.A. Dodgers. But within the NL it could be different in a week’s time, for the Dodgers are only one game ahead of the NL Central’s top team, the 53-43 Milwaukee Brewers and two ahead of the NL East’s numero uno, the 51-42 Washington Nationals, while the A’s are six games ahead of the AL Central’s Tigers and seven above the AL East’s number one team, the Orioles. . . . . // . . NBA: (Revised:) “How About Those Superstars?”---LeBron James will be back with the Cleveland Cavaliers, Carmelo Anthony will be staying with the New York Knicks, Dywane Wade will re-sign with the Miami Heat. Could this mean that “the ride of the Superstars” is over, that the gathering of top guns isn’t how to always win an NBA championship title? Is the concept of NBA pseudo-Gods vs. the rest of the competition no longer the franchise-development strategy that NBA owners should invest in to win? Has the concept gone from sure thing to a “well, maybe.” Or is it that today’s superstar prefers being solo, that he likes the challenge of going to a team where he alone can make the difference---Wyatt Earp coming to town by himself, whipping Dodge into shape? But we don’t think so. Undoubtedly, the San Antonio Spurs showed this year that the “teamwork team” can outperform the superstar team, and no matter the thoughts that James, Anthony and Wade might have had about this it’s a good guess that the “free” in “free” agency dominated their thought processes for lining up choices for where to be. Surely the three have seen free agency as advantageous to what is personal, linked to that pressing question, “What is it that I should be doing with the rest of my days in the NBA?” Certainly NOT to prove the worth of any strategy. Instead, the three deserve credit for going with what they’ve believed is best for themselves in the long run, and so their considerations have surely been about more than basketball, e.g., family, preferred town to be living in, money, and definitely for James “what to be after basketball, possibly a go at community leadership.” And, great for the NBA is that the decisions made by James, Anthony and Wade could help to guarantee the existence of more “teamwork-teams,” of less quirky experimentation than if each chose only to be partnered with another superstar. . . “DREAMS & FEARS”---NOT one of the 30 National Basketball Association franchises is without two or three vulnerabilities, and so it could never be that the association that binds them to a degree of sorts, the NBA, would lack vulnerabilities, that which could hurt the sport. One of these NBA vulnerabilities is being highlighted this off-season, “the impact of superstars as free agents and how that affects the rest of the NBA.” Another is “the sleaziness of the L.A. Clippers for sale-battle that emerged from owner Don Sterling going foot-in-mouth and revealing a racist undertone within his particular practice of boss-employee relations. The danger of the former vulnerability is in superstar-dom causing the NBA to exist as a lop-sided enterprise, with just a few teams lucky enough to afford the very best, the rest either copy-catting them and failing or unable to rise up against them in the standings year after year for financial reasons. Competed here, then, are two franchise-development concepts, (1) Win repeatedly because you’ve paired a LeBron with an Anthony, or a Durant with a Paul George, or (2) Win because you’ve built a team that puts “teamwork” above everything else, with say a roster including 11 above-the-margin teammates who can make playing for each other paramount, this via a combination of finely sharpened skill-sets, though none of the 11 could ever reach the athletic heights of the superstar. Yes, it’s a battle that’s been going on since James, Wade and Bosh joined the Miami Heat, between (a) the Heat idea, and (b) that which a no-superstar team like the Denver Nuggets coached by George Karl and now Brian Shaw can do by replacing ego-dominated athletics with the notion “teamwork wins best.” Also, it can be said that players like James, Durant and George are at a premium in the basketball world, there can be just so many of them. Rather, only a few “greats” appear in any decade. To copycat the Heat turned out to be a blunder for a lot of teams that went for it, e.g., that which has happened to the L.A. Lakers from constructing a post-Phil Jackson team of superstars has been sad indeed, and believing in the teamwork-team, in all players equally capable of leadership as well as having a broad array of skills, like the San Antonio Spurs led by Gregg Popovich, can be the answer for an NBA comprising competitive franchises, all with a chance of prevailing one over the other, in effect, an NBA with sufficient parity for any team to come up big in the post-season. Maybe there could be a comeback Orlando Magic, “and take note of LeBron James just announcing his return to the Cleveland Cavaliers, possibly from a lesson that he learned this year, that a teamwork-team like the Spurs could be the better answer for himself and the NBA all-around.” . . . AS to the Sterling-Clippers affair, it’s junk food for persons who have an appetite for the gaudy, who snap, crackle and pop over what the reported low-ends of human behavior can present for them, tabloid-stuff. Unfortunately, this affects “growth of false perceptions” within our country of what the NBA can be about; such nonsense taints the NBA as if Sleaze, Inc. Yes, the NBA has managerial, administrative and leadership flaws, but by-and-large it works, it has kept more to the side of decency and growth for one of the world’s most captivating sports, “but there’s a corner of media that likes to cover only the megalomania, mendacity and dumb + dumber.” Should the matter worsen, one hopes for some NBA damage control. END/ml