Breaking Out the DS

The other day we had some cheesecake with cherries at work (sometimes having a job rocks, although it’s rare). One of my co-workers is pregnant, and she mentioned that, while the cherries were good, it would be better topped with strawberries…or chicken. The lesson here is that pregnant women are nuts.

You know what’s equally nuts though? The Village Tavern’s been running as a sports site for a year now and nobody is picking playoff games on here yet, other then when I (correctly, of course) picked the last Super Bowl. Well, we’re changing that now.

Minnesota Twins vs. Oakland A’s:

The Tigers could have made this a lot easier by beating the Royals once and setting up Tigers/A’s and Twins/Yankees, as I could have then simply gone with the “pick against the teams that lose in the ALDS every year” strategy. Instead, we get the battle of the two teams that always gripe about their “small market” status (ok, their fans do), yet routinely make the playoffs and play in two of the largest stadiums in baseball. I actually think the big football stadiums are part of the reason these teams lose in the first round so often – in the playoffs, you either have 60,000 people at a baseball game, half of whom have seats facing random places in the outfield, or you have several empty seats at a playoff game. Either one just feels weird, and home-field advantage is as much about the home team being comfortable as it is anything else. Anyway, this one’s a really tough call, so I’m going to apply what I’ll call MLB playoffs rule #1: If it’s not obvious, pick the team from the better division. That’s the Twins in this case, so I’m taking them.

New York Yankees vs. Detroit Tigers:

This is another tough one. I’ll say that the Tigers remind me more of the 2005 Sox than any other team playing this year, including the 2006 Sox: they have a great rotation, all of their relievers are having career years, they don’t make mistakes defensively, they can manufacture runs, and they have a good mix of guys that are genuinely likable and guys that are a little bit abrasive (and you need both). But rule #2 comes into play here: “Don’t pay attention to the second-half record like everyone else does, just look at what the team did in the last week and a half or so.” Look, winning a five or seven game series requires something totally different than sustaining excellence over a 162-game season, and it frequently just comes down to who’s hot at the right time. From looking at it quickly, I thought the Tigers, A’s, and Cardinals all looked bad, while one team (we’ll get to that later) looked really good. The most disturbing thing was the pitching for Detroit – over the last six games they gave up 3, 7, 8, 9, 9, and 10 runs. And the Yankees have a slightly better lineup than the Royals do.

Also, although I hate to be involved in giving this more coverage than it’s going to get, I love moving A-Rod (it’s an annoying nickname, but it’s also really easy to type…) down in the lineup – as a 3 or 4 hitter he absolutely kills you because he never comes up big in the clutch, but as a 5 or 6, where the pitcher’s a little worn down from facing the heart of the lineup, and you can go 0-fo-5 without killing the team, it’s perfect. Of course, now that he’s not being expected to carry the offense, it’s no longer sufficient to just say that A-Rod is the most overpaid athlete in sports. I’d now say that if you made a list of the ten most overpaid people in the world, Rodriguez would probably be number four or five, and everyone else on the list would be a close friend or relative of a third-world dictator. But, with all that said, I’ll take the Yankees (I’m now going to go take a bath in Listerine).

St. Louis Cardinals vs. San Diego Padres:

This is one of those weird picks where it almost feels like both teams are a little too obvious: San Diego because they’ve been relatively hot, especially considering how the Cardinals backed their way in, and the Cardinals because they’re clearly the better team on paper. I’m going to go with the Padres, partly because the San Diego Chicken makes me crave some cheesecake, but mostly because the Cards have so many problems. They don’t have a closer (and it was one of those situations that was such as mess that nobody even got excited about picking up the backup closer in fantasy leagues when Isringhausen went down), between the late season skid and all the injuries the season kind of has a “it’s just not our year” kind of feel for them, other than Carpenter the rotation’s been hideous, and they’re starting to get to that dangerous point the Braves were at where nobody really gets all that excited about just making the playoffs. Also, both rule #1 and rule #2 are in effect in this case. We’ll call this one rule #3: Don’t pick a team based on talent unless there’s at least one other decent reason to pick them. So Padres it is.

New York Mets vs. Los Angeles Dodgers:

Ok, here’s the thing – the Mets are the best team in the NL this year. It’s obvious enough that it can’t really be denied. They probably would even have been a playoff team in the American League. But the best team doesn’t always win a five game series. And there’s something about the Dodgers this year – the way they lost Gagne for the season without being affected at all, that goofy five homerun game, the way they managed to avoid getting lit up or going on a costly losing streak, despite not really having a starter that you would seriously consider an ace. This sort of thing only happens to special teams. Plus, the Dodgers are pretty much a collection of players that should be in the playoffs, even if you don’t think of any of them as Dodgers – Nomar, Maddux, Kenny Lofton, Jeff Kent, Rafael Furcal, Odalis Perez (just wanted to see if you were awake), and even Derek Lowe. It’s completely realistic to expect any of those guys to come up huge in this series. But the biggest factor in play is rule #4: Teams that win those crazy wild-card races with the entire league should scare the crap out of you. If you’ve been following baseball, you know what I mean – it’s frequently the wild card in the inferior (at the top) league, so the temptation is to write them off, but by default it’s a team that’s hot at the right time, and usually is from a good division. Plus, I can’t pick both New York teams. That would be sickening. So Dodgers it is.

And for the rest of it…you’re just going to have to wait.