Yo, let's do this! Here's a clear, objective and truthful appraisal of the Paul Molitor League as it moves past the All Star Game and towards its inevitable conclusion where we all gather round to congratulate "Warming Hand Up Before Pulling Wang" and "Team Amador" for making the rest of us look semi-competent...
East (in a division of utter suckitude we'll start with the most sucky)
Team Amador (winning percentage: .407)
If this were actually a true East versus West battle (and it absolutely is) then Team Amador would be the equivalent of Ma$e. He's repping the East Coast, has an appalling name and has all the ability of something that has such limited ability that it doesn't really have an ability at all and hence is widely known for it's lack of ability. I'm sure the Germans have a word that sums up the mixture of pity and amusement you feel when something reaches this type of level of ineptness but I'd reckon that the team that KittensMittons managed to KittensMittons a couple of years ago would still beat this one. Although Cobb and Tillman have let him down his pitching isn't too bad but when your best hitter after Mike Trout is a toss-up between Kyle Seager, Melky Cabrera and Christian Yelich then you know you don't have too much to shout about.
Scooter Puff Sr: The Doombringer (.430)
Having your team being compared to a legendary, five times world champion boxer would normally mean your side was right up there in the standings. However, when you're actually being compared to a legendary, five times world champion when he is toppling around the ring like a drunk attempting to recreate the Macarena it probably isn't so good. That's Scooter Puff Sr– immense amounts of promise that's been realised in the form of Nelson Cruz and Troy Tulowitski followed by immense amounts of embarrassing crapitude such as JJ Hardy, Mark Trumbo, Aaron Hill and Wilson Ramos. Chumbawamba's advice to get back up again after getting knocked down isn't a sensible suggestion for this team – Scooter Puff Sr, please just stay lying down on the canvas...
Upton Abbey (.473)
It's well-known that the only state that you can spell using one row of keys on your keyboard is Alaska. It's slightly less well-known that you can do the same for one Major League Baseball team - admittedly though that's only if you're aware that due to a horrific but amusing error at a patent office in Illinois in the early 20th Century, the actual official team name of the Chicago Cubs is "We R Poopy-Poo". The same official name isn't quite suitable as an alternative for Upton Abbey but compared to expectations they've had a pretty poopy start to the season. They do own a superlative ERA and have a mash-heavy line-up with Jose Abreu, George Springer and Anthony Rizzo but Bryce Harper's absence hasn't helped and Mookie Betts only deserves a starting place if you're deliberately trying to create a team of players with amusing names. In particular, a self-Hyatting for the team owner is more than deserved for still rolling out Billy Butler - although this is somewhat ironic given that rolling is presently Billy Butler's primary and quickest form of transportation. A bit of luck in the next few weeks will be necessary to get a play off place.
Mr Holland's OPS (.487)
You know the cool fact that a duck's quack doesn't echo, yeah? You do? Well in that case you're a gullible idiot who'll believe anything. It's an urban myth, you fool. What other stupidness do you go along with? I bet you reckon that Shakespeare didn't really write any of his plays, that a World War II bomber was found on the moon and that the St Louis Cardinals are just a touch "misunderstood" and really are a bunch of happy-go-lucky pranksters bringing joy to the masses wherever they play. Oh, and I bet you'd also believe that Mr Holland's OPS are a fantastic team when the reality is they're treading water in such an inauspicious way they're giving the word "mid-table" a bad name. Loads of steals (hello Jose Altuve, Jacoby Ellsbury and Dee Gordon!) provide a semblance of excitement but while loading up on speed can provide a cheap high, ignoring everything else makes this team seem like the guy who deliberately wears an incredibly expensive tie in a deluded attempt to impress the petite, single girl who sometimes sits in the neighbouring cubicle at work while not caring that his shirt has ketchup down the front, his shoes are untied and he hasn't washed his hair in three weeks.
Not A Player I Just Khrush A Lot (1.503)
There was a lot of commentary recently about the World Cup bringing Americans together in a spirit of public revelry in a way that has not happened for a while. Actually, the reality is that there are only two things that should bring the entire nation of the USA together. The first is this wonderful facebook group and the second is the knowledge that this particular fantasy team not only has an awesome name (hence why I've rightly given them an extra 1.000 in their winning percentage) that references both a cool player and a great rapper but they are the sole good thing about the East division. Seriously, it's as if we discovered that one of NSYNC was actually not only a fairly decent singer but a really competent and engaging actor as well (note: this is not my personal opinion but a completely transparent attempt to ingratiate myself with Dikembe). This is an up and down team – great on Ks, quality starts and runs but absolutely nothing in the way of saves or home runs. In fact, when the guy with the second most home runs on your team is Michael Brantley your team probably khrushes about as much in 2014 as Big Pun does.
West (making the East look insignificant since the start of the season)
Warming up Hand Before Pulling Wang (.393)
One of the best places to be is that oh-so-smug position where morality intersects with self-interest. Invest in "ethical share portfolios" that flukily outperform the market? Be honest with your boss about your shortcomings and still see him promote you the next month? Return an old handbag you find left on a train only for the owner to send you $100 due to the sentimental value? When it works you're sitting on cloud nine, when it doesn't you've a fantasy team roster that is correctly chock full of Brewers (Segura, Braun, Davis, Lohse), rightly does not have a single Cardinal or Cub and yet ends up with the lowest winning percentage in the league. Worst runs, RBIs, OBP and Ks in the league says it all. Mind you, I've only just realised that the team name contains a reference to Donovan Hand so I can hardly make fun of anyone...
Aramis' Colon Crusaders (.523)
You might think this team name is a reference to the injury history of the Crew's third baseman but both the well-placed apostrophe and the reference to the colon is really a very subtle paean to the owner's absolute and total obsession with any issue connected to grammar. If you took Mos Def's threat to cut someone's ass in half and leave them with a semi-colon and put in practice with this team you'd be left with two halves of fairly decent quality. In fact, they've actually got a really thorough line-up – Brian Dozier, Hanley Ramirez, McCutchen, Brandon Moss, a genius catcher with awesome pitch framing skills, Adam Wainwright and Clayton Kershaw that makes you wonder why they might still miss out on a play-off place.
2am draft? WTF? (.583)
Sport and lying go together. Dennis Mitchell's excuse for failing a drugs test was a classic. Rosie Ruiz tried to fake inning the Boston Marathon. Golf is supposedly self-deprecatingly "a good walk spoiled" when this is simply a huge lie to cover up the undeniable fact that it is actually a very very shitty walk in an incredibly boring landscape that is not just spoiled but rendered completely and utterly devoid of any meaningful purpose. Of course, if I possessed the merest suggestion of a decent golf swing this opinion would be null and void. If I was to claim that my "2am draft? WTF?" team deserved to be the third best team in the Paul Molitor League it wouldn't quite be as egregious as those claims but it wouldn't be too far off. My once torrid hitting has tailed off as Pujols and Donaldson have slowed down and my porous pitching has just about held together enough to scrape some wins here and there. This is despite arsing up the draft by not only mistakenly purchasing every single semi-shitty first baseman going (Napoli, Freeman, Carlos Santana and Belt to go with Pujols) and spending only approximately a mere four and a half dollars on my pitching staff. Like Scotland leading at half-time in a football match, some things just are not meant to last...
Crocodile Greinke (.590)
You shouldn't be allowed to have Brian McCann and Carlos Gomez in the same side. It's like pairing Talisker whisky with Cheesestrings or creating a mash-up track of The Clash and Pitbull. Or bumping into the blonde girl with seductive dark eyes you fancied at school but never got together with (despite the fact she couldn't quite hide her smile whenever she said your name) only to find out that she's just married that idiot who used to sit in your class and repeatedly, repeatedly annoy everyone by laughing in a very high pitched voice. It's not right, it's not meant to happen, but somehow it has. This team might still walk to the championship this year but definitely wins the Paul Molitor League award for 2010-11, being stacked with players like Brett Gardner, Hunter Pence, Ian Kinsler, Curtis Granderson, Jimmy Rollins, Adrian Gonzales, Hiroki Kuroda and Jonathan Papelbon who were fairly superb not that long ago and are somehow vaguely holding it together this year.
St Louis PEDiatrics (.610)
Armadillos are just about the coolest animal possible. If they're in water they can either sink to the bottom and walk across it or inflate their intestines so they can float on the top. They normally have batches of four children, all of which are the same sex. They can catch leprosy – admittedly not something that is itself "cool" (unless you're weirdly into animal diseases) but a neat fact nonetheless. That's enough even without the whole "roll yourself into a bowling ball" malarkey. In fact, the only thing that keeps them from the top spot in the coolest animal stakes is the existence of Hank the Dog who still remains so superlatively fantastic that the UN has ordered the world's top biologists to convene an extra-ordinary meeting so they can rearrange the animal classification system to make Hank a unique species. While I have no wish to see the owner of St Louis PEDiatrics attempt to inflate his intestines in a swimming pool it's undeniable that his team is pretty damn fine and almost approaching Hankian levels of brilliance. It is just incredibly solid throughout both hitting and pitching – you wouldn't have been surprised to see Mike Stanton do so well, but Billy Hamilton, Julio Teheran and Masahiro Tanaka have all more than answered those who doubted them pre-season. They might still Devon Loch this whole competition, but at present they're the team to beat...