A hurried baseball playoffs preview

I went for a run last weekend, and I needed to wear a glove. It's cold out, but it's still the kind of cold that makes you feel more awake than you really are, rather than the kind of cold that makes you wish you lived in Mallorca. And while this means many things, the thing it means for the purpose of this blog post is that it's time for playoff baseball.

It's been a rough couple of years for me as a baseball fan. The Mets haven't been legitimately good since I was a freshman in college. The Red Sox are out of the playoffs for the first time since that same year, but they haven't been a legitimate championship contender since the 2007 season (in which they were really strong contenders, contending longer than anyone else). In the past two seasons, the two teams I most hate - the Phillies and then the Yankees - won championships. It got to the point where I was sort of rooting for the Braves at one point this year. The Braves.

But though it's not much fun, with my favorite teams on early-fall vacations and my most despised primed for glory, I'm a baseball fan, so I'm obligated to watch the playoffs. Why? Because the playoffs are awesome, no matter who's playing. The only sport that has an argument for a superior playoffs is hockey, and that's mostly just because they have a cooler trophy. But that's not what I'm interested in talking about right now, mostly because it's far too Costasian and I'm far too tall to write like he talks.

I'm sticking to who's going to win and why it's going to happen. I know the games have started, but I tweeted the picks earlier. So I'm not using the first slate of games as a barometer - these are blind picks. They're blind in another way - though I love me some statistics, I'm going against my own advice and going mostly on gut feelings. We'll see how much I know about a baseball season that I largely ignored, for the sake of my emotional state. I'll talk a bit about the championship series and the World Series as I pick them, but I'll cover that more after the actual teams are set. I'm assuming I won't have a perfect record of picks here. Let's do this thing.
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ALDS: Rays over Rangers (3-1), Twins over Yankees (3-2)

There are two reasons I'm picking the Rays to win the first of the divisional series to start. First of all, I'm totally unconvinced that any team expecting to get anything out of Jeff Francoeur can win. He's played pretty well since the Mets traded him, but that's mostly (if not entirely) due to the small size of the available sample. He is not a good hitter. Of course, he's a bench player, because though he's a cocaine fan, Ron Washington is still apparently smarter than Jerry Manuel. So he's not really that much of a factor.

The main reason I'm picking the Rays is because I think they're much deeper than the Rangers. Josh Hamilton has been hurt, as has Evan Longoria. But the Rays don't rely on Longoria the same way that the Rangers lean on Hamilton. They also have a deeper pitching staff, to my eye. I feel like the Rangers have, to an extent, gotten fat on a weaker division out west, while the Rays have had to deal with the Yankees, Red Sox, and Blue Jays all summer. The Rays have performed better against better competition, and that's why they'll win this series.

In the other series, I'm going against history. The Yankees have beaten the Twins in the playoffs several times in the past decade, but this year I think the twins are going to finally break through. The main reason for this is my belief that these Yankees are very overrated. CC Sabathia is a very good pitcher (not the best in the league, but that's another post), but after him, they'll be relying on the injured Andy Pettite and the unknown quantity that is Phil Hughes. Their bullpen is Mariano Rivera and a collection of inconsistency. Their lineup is very good, but hitting doesn't win in the playoffs the same way it does in the regular season. They're going to have to lean on their pitching, and their pitching is going to crack at some point. The Yankees are going to win two games, but that's all.

NLDS: Phillies over Reds (3-0), Giants over Braves (3-1)

The Phillies are a good team. They have three pitchers better than the Reds' best, and I see no situation in which the Reds will be able to beat the Phillies. The Reds have some hitters, but I don't think that they'll break through against Halladay or Oswalt. Hamels is a bit less reliable in my eyes, but he's still better than Johnny Cueto. Also, as much as I dislike Hamels, he hasn't ended anyone's career.

The Giants and Braves can both pitch. Neither can hit. The Giants are better at pitching. They're going to win. (That, by the way, is the most laconic thing I've ever written.)

ALCS: Twins over Rays. This will be a very even series if it happens. Fundamentally sound, well-played baseball - entertaining for the fans, but maybe not anyone else. I see Joe Mauer having a huge series, and Jim Thome right behind him.

NLCS: Giants over Phillies. There will be about six runs scored in this series. The Giants are more used to having to scrape together runs, so they'll be better suited for a matchup like this.

World Series: Twins over Giants. The streak continues for San Francisco. Minnesota christens their new ballpark in style. Also, I'll get to say "Well played, Mauer" a lot.

Feel free to offer your own predictions in the comments, if you like. And if I said something stupid that is statistically unprovable, feel free to call me on it, but remember that this is based on my feel of the series, rather than...well, things that you can prove. It's less accurate, but it's more fun that way.

E-A-S-Y

The New York Post is mostly trash, but this is pretty awesome.


Take that, The Sun.

Also, this is my 50th post here. So that's also pretty cool.

Some things about Stephen Strasburg

The Blitzkrieg with pie on his face. Nice game, rook.

The history of humanity is littered with those who couldn't live up to the hype. Kwame Brown, Darko Miličić, Mark Prior, Brien Taylor. Every now and then, though, someone actually breaks through. When LeBron James was first coming into the NBA, and the hype surrounding him was at its height, I remember thinking that there wasn't any way for him to match expectations. Somehow, he did.

Seven innings pitched, 14 strikeouts, no walks.

I didn't think that there was any way that Stephen Strasburg could possibly come close to living up to the hype. I mean, Curt Schilling said a few weeks ago that he'd be the best pitcher in the majors the day he first stepped on a mound. These were lofty expectations that Strasburg had been saddled with. And somehow he actually surpassed them.
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I don't want to go too far into this, for a few reasons. Most of what can be said has already been said by people who said it better than I would have anyway. But I do want to mention a few things.

First of all, we need to not get too far ahead of ourselves. His first game was spectacular, but I've heard people talking about the Hall of Fame already. Nick Evans looked like a Hall of Famer after one game and now nobody even knows who he is. It was against the Pirates, it was a pitchers' umpire...blah blah blah. My newfound sabermetrics expertise leads me to say that the sample size is far too small to make a real judgement.

Now that I have that out of the way, HOLY CRAP DID YOU SEE HIM PITCH. I have never seen anything like that. Literally. I've been watching baseball for a long time, and I've never seen a pitcher like Stephen Strasburg, even for one start. I went to a restaurant with some friends to watch him. I was the only one who really wanted him to do well; one was a Pirates fan, the other didn't really have a reason that I'm aware of. They were both talking some smack before he started pitching. After about an inning, it died down because there wasn't anything to say. He gave up a home run; it was on a good pitch. He made next to no mistakes.

The most impressive thing to me was the fact that I was impressed by him. I'm not usually easily impressed, but at one point during the game I actually yelled with surprise at one of Strasburg's curveballs. It was moving at apparent fastball speed, and then it dropped about two feet. I have no idea how anyone's supposed to hit that.

It's going to be a little while before we know how good Stephen Strasburg's going to be over the long-term. But for one night, I'm willing to throw sample size and rationality out the window. That was a damned good performance by Strasburg last night, and it was fun to watch. And I am impressed.

(Could we ditch the "Mr. Precedent" nickname, also? Because it's horrible. Come up with something more awesome. Like The Blitzkrieg - after all, he does have a German-ish name.)

This is awesome: Best comeback ever

This is my first football post. I don't really like football, so that's why. Sorry.

Okay, so evidently Visanthe "I Don't Have a Real Name" Shiancoe and Darren "X Marks the Spot" Sharper are having a Twitter fight. The particulars won't be revisited here, mostly because they're irrelevant. What's relevant is Shiancoe's final salvo.

During a team visit with the Minnesota National Guard, one soldier "suggested a custom target for" Shiancoe, which he then tweeted:


Well played, Shiancoe.