Monday the New York Yankees continued their hot play and caused the New York Mets to continue their slide. The Detroit Tigers’ bullpen nearly blew another “easy” save and the Seattle Mariners continued to look nothing like the team that was playing just a couple weeks ago.

As the Yankees get ready to head to Colorado to take on the Rockies, they are playing great baseball. And it must make George Steinbrenner happy to know that his Yankees got the best of first the Boston Red Sox and then the Mets in the last couple of weeks.

It seems that everyone is getting the best of the Mets these least few weeks. The Mets have gone from looking like one of the Major League’s best teams to just an ordinary team. Lucky for them, the Atlanta Braves and the Philadelphia Phillies haven’t been gaining much ground because both of them have been playing as poorly.

Meanwhile the Detroit Tigers are doing fine and working through the pitching injuries they’ve had this year. They survived Bonderman being on the DL. They also got through Fernando Rodney being injured and it looks like they are going to get Kenny Rogers back at the end of this week. Now they just need to get Zumaya back and they’ll have all the main keys to their pitching staff.

However, the Tigers need to be concerned about their bullpen, at least until Zumaya comes back. The bullpen that was so great last year, has already given up their fair share of comeback wins. It nearly happened again on Monday night.

Todd Jones entered the ninth inning with a four run lead to the Washington Nationals. He quickly gave-up three runs and had men on base before he finally got the three outs he needed. It turned out okay for the Tigers but they have to be a little but concerned about Todd Jones. Jones does not seem to be very effective lately.

Perhaps when Zumaya returns he’ll inherit the job of being the closer. But that could create more problems as the chemistry will be disrupted in the bullpen. It’s been shown how important chemistry is by the fact that Rodney has struggled in his new role of setting up in the eighth for Jones to pitch the ninth. Of course that’s Zumaya’s regular role, which he’ll be back to filling if he doesn’t take over for Jones.

As the Mets are struggling, so too are the Seattle Mariners. The Mariners looked like they were turning things back around this year and were poised to challenge for the AL West or at least the Wild Card. But lately they’ve begun to play poorly too.

This coming week should continue to be interesting as the season moves toward the All-Star game and gets closer and closer to the dog days of summer.