CALL ME CRAZY, I PROCLAIM THIS TEAM RIGHT HERE THE RAYS OF 09. meaning next year, we are gonna do what the Rays are doing now.
We got a team here, folks. If things break our way we could win the division next year. We got more young talent that anyone in our division by far. The Braves are going to be horrible for the foreseeable future and the Mets and Phils have about hit the end of their roads.
I'm glad I'm not the only person who thinks so. I was saying these things even when we were sucking, in places like the Plan thread and the Incurable Optimists thread. If we add a top-flight left-fielder and a good first baseman, and
maybe a serviceable starting pitcher who comes cheap, we will turn things around bigtime. The Rays are actually a good example: over this past offseason, they added basically almost nothing - Troy Percival, I think a couple bench players, and a couple relievers. The rest was homegrown talent they already had lying around. We need to borrow some of their plays and put the last touches on this team, while we wait for the REAL reinforcements to bubble up from A and AA ball.
However, I'm not happy with our current win streak. I really want us to finish with 105 losses on the season. Why? Well, Stephen Strasburg is a pretty awesome reason, but there's another one. The record for biggest difference in W/L records from one season to the next is (I think!?) 39. Tampa Bay almost certainly won't break this one (they'd have to pull off a Rockies-style 20-game win streak). We could have before this annoying winning streak started; before these 5 we had a realistic shot at going, say, 56-106, which would have almost guaranteed that next year we'd break the record.
