Lingq Baseball Podcast 4-17-09

This is uh Chris Sarda's first baseball podcast for Lingq. In these baseball podcasts I'm going to talk about two or three stories that are happening today in baseball for the day. And uh then we're going to go over the standings and hopefully you can learn a little English. Let's start with Hideki Matsui he's injured he's an important part of the Yankee's lineup. It looks like his knee has filled with fluid, and uh the Yankees are just all around banged up and so they have to put down the All Star and bring out Juan Miranda. Who knows who he is? It's getting tough for the Yankees, they're going to need to do something there. They are barely holding on to third place, they're .500 lucky for them the other two teams that were going to give them trouble are below them, so Boston and Tampa aren't playing great either. A lot of people think it's going to be Tampa or Boston to win the... the division, uh but we'll see. Something very important, Matsui is only going to be pinch hitting for awhile.

Next up Angels take on the Mariners. Joe Saunders was the pitcher he was uh actually, his alma mater is Virginia Tech and I guess today was the anniversary of the shooting that happened their a couple years ago. And also, also his teammate Nick Adenheart died just a few day ago, hit by a drunk driver, so the Angels are a real emotional team right now. And they were able to destroy Seattle 5-1, which is no surprise, something that is news though, for the Mariners, is that Ichiro Suzuki was able to become the Japanese hit king. He got his three thousandth eight sixth hit uh beating Isao Harimoto who of course had three thousand eighty five hits. Harimoto very interesting, Ichiro said about Harimoto in 1995, 14 years ago, Harimoto told me the only guy who can break my record is you. For him to have had that vision of the future,for him to say that to a player that has only one year under his belt, I'm amazed Suzuki said through his interpreter. So Mr. Harimoto there predicted Suzuki would be one of the greats.

Let's take a look at one other story. The Dodgers continue to play great after a slow start. Uh so Dodgers just continue to score runs, it's a great lineup that pitching needs to hold up, their pitching needs to hold up. Uh they don't have great pitchers, but they have young pitchers with promise. Lucky they have such a strong lineup with people like Casey Blake, Matt Kemp, of course Manny Ramirez.

Let's take a look at the standings now. The American League central is a joke of a league. Kansas City, Chicago White Sox,Detroit Tigers, Minnesota, and the Cleveland Indians are there. And anybody can take that division in fact, it's uh, three teams are 5 and 4 right now, so it can go anyway. The Angels are 4 and 5 right now I don't expect them to have any trouble in the American League West. Let's take a look at the National League East. Lot of people are thinking Philadelphia to win this division, but their holding third right now it's a long season though their run differential is minus twelve. So that means they've scored twelve runs less than they've been scored against so those bats need to start up. Dodgers and San Diego are tied people really don't expect San Diego to do much, expect them to be a last place team but they're 7 and 3 right now at the beginning of the season. And uh a lot of people were think San Francisco was going to fight the Dodgers for first place here but uh they're only 2 and 7 of course they had to play the Dodgers at the beginning. Okay that's about all we're going to do for now. Thanks for listening. See you later.