Eight days left...

...in the baseball season and it's 11pm on Saturday night and I finally feel like talking about it.


-I never got around to congratulating the Mets on their first division championship since 1988, but I'm not really feeling that congratulatory vibe just yet. I'm excited for the playoffs to start, but I'm not as confident in this Met team as I was just a couple of months ago. The Mets are playing .500 baseball in September (11-11 thru today), David Wright just today hit his first home run at Shea since before the All-Star break, the starting pitching is messy and inconsistent. Thank God (or, if you prefer, Bill "The Spaceman" Lee - I know I would) for a killer bullpen, second only to San Diego's. I have a feeling they are going to be working a lot throughout this playoff season.

-Looks like the Dodgers are, perhaps, prepped and ready to have a fork stuck in their collective asses. The Dodgers, Padres and Phillies, all three teams competing for the last two playoff spots, all finish the season on the road after this Sunday's games and the Dodgers, far and away, have the worst road record of the three. Too much inconsistency for a team that was very much underrated thru much of the season.

-Early prognostication?

NL:
Mets
Cardinals
Padres
Phillies

AL:
Yankees
Twins (winning the AL Central)
Athletics
Tigers (taking the Wild Card)

Mets v. A's in the World Series.

No picks for who wins just yet, but I'm sure you can guess who I'm rooting for. But I think the A's are gonna surprise a lot of people in the playoffs. Yankees fans are more deluded than I thought they were if they really believe that Bobby Abreu is the puzzle-piece they've been lacking for the past five years. The Twins will be back next year, hopefully with a healthy Francisco Liriano. They were ridiculously good this year when they had Santana and Liriano anchoring their rotation. And since the Tigers will draw either New York or Oakland in the first round (they are 7-9 vs. NY/OAK), they will get Jim Leyland the AL Manager of the Year Award, but unfortunately no World Series ring to go along with it.

...more to come...