Opening Day!

I really had wanted to get started here in advance of Opening Day, but life got in the way. Making up for lost time:

Official playoff predictions:

AL: Yankees, W. Sox, Angels. Wild Card: Boston.
NL: Braves, Cardinals, Dodgers. Wild Card: Mets.

World Series: Yankees/Cardinals. The Cardinals try to get another notch closer to 26 but fall short and the Yankees win the WS in 6.

I hate to be picking so much chalk, but:

Oakland is everyone's trendy pick this year. My not picking them is partially a reflection of the fact that the trendy pick almost never pans out. Cleveland? Teams that overachieved the previous year rarely do as well the following year. Minnesota's pitching should keep them very competitive, but it still looks like the White Sox have too much. I didn't like the Thome acquisition but I look an idiot already, Thome having gone deep last night. Toronto has improved and should hang around quite a while. Tampa Bay will be a very difficult team to play but they still lack pitching and will lose a lot of 10-7 games this year.

I see few playoff locks in the generally weak NL. The Mets should challenge the Braves but every year people get burned thinking the Braves' run is finally over. I don't see any big challenge to the Cardinals in the Central. No, it's NOT the Cubs' year. Perhaps they have something special planned for the centennial in 2008. In the West, I suppose that if Bonds doesn't totally break down the Giants are a contender, but I simply refuse to pick them for the playoffs. The Dodgers are as much a protest pick as anything else.

Predictions are fun. Let's hope my baseball predictions turn out better than my NCAA pool selections.

Dumb thing I heard during last night's White Sox/Indians game on ESPN: John (Balloon Head) Miller said, "it doesn't feel quite right calling the White Sox the 'World Champions' after we've just had the World Baseball Classic." John, please! Put down the Bud Selig Kool-Aid! The White Sox are the World Champions -- they decisively won the Championship of the highest level baseball league in the world. Done. MLB's scheme for selling more T-shirts in other countries has nothing to do with who is the "World Champion."

Dumb thing about last night's ESPN game: The two hour and fifty-seven minute rain delay. The game resumed in the fourth inning at 12:20 AM Eastern time (11:20 PM local time). As usual, MLB and ESPN have the fans' best interests at heart. It reminded me of Bill Murray in Caddyshack, telling the bishop in the midst of a monsoon, "I'd keep playing -- the real heavy stuff isn't coming down for another couple of hours."

Dumb thing about baseball in general: Bud Selig's "investigation" of steroids. On many levels, and I can't begin to get into them all right now. But, one aspect that troubles me, and which I've heard no one talk about, is this: George Mitchell is the Chairman of the Board of Disney. Corporate parent of ESPN, the head cheerleader in all this as MLB looked the other way. Oh well. They don't make investigations like they used to.

My Yankees are taking on those trendy A's tonight a 10PM start, my time. Going to be tough staying up for the whole thing. More soon.