ALCS Preview

The defending champion Red Sox take on the upstart Rays in a match up of probably the two best teams in baseball. Who will win? Well, lets see how they match up.

Starting pitching:

The Sox will go Matsuzaka, Beckett, Lester, and Wakefield while the Rays will go Shields, Kazmir, Garza, and Sonnanstine.

The Red Sox are clearly better, but how much better will depend on which Beckett shows up. Will it be the Beckett from the division series because if so, the Rays will have a very good chance in games 2 and 6 with their wild card Scott Kazmir pitching. If it is the Beckett from 2003 or 2007, this series is over and it has yet to begin.

Advantage: Red Sox.

Lineup:

The Rays are solid with Iwamura, Crawford, Pena, Navaro, and budding superstars Longoria and Upton. Their holes are at short and possibly rightfield. They also run into trouble against pitchers of the lefthanded persuasion. The Sox counter with 4 very good hitters: Bay, Youk, Ortiz, and Pedroia. The Sox have decent to good hitters in Elsbury, Lowrie, and Drew with the Lowell replacement and Varitek being the holes. They are less suseptable to lefties.

Advantage: Push. The Sox are better on paper, but the Rays have been performing in the playoffs and have some huge talents.

Bullpen:

This is a tough one because the Rays bullpen is deeper, but Papelbon is unquestionably the best reliever in baseball. The Rays can bring Howell, Balfour, Price, and Miller, and that's better than Masterson/Delcarmen/Lopez/Iwojima/Whoever, but it's not enough better to cancel out Papelbon vs. Wheeler which isn't close.

Advantge: Red Sox

Bench/Defense/Management/Intangibles
The benches are pretty equal with Lowell's injury possibly tilting the edge to the Rays. The defenses are both excellent, but again the Rays get a bit of an edge. Ditto on the managers. The Sox hold the edge in the intangibles with a variety of playoff warriors.

Advantge: Rays.

Prediction: Sox in 7. I've gone over it a bunch of times and I don't see how they can beat the Sox 4 out of 7. They will have to beat Dice-K twice, Wake once, and either Beckett or Lester once. I see almost no way they can beat Lester since their lineup is severly weakend by a lefty. Lester is also going agaist the erratic Garza. I don't see them beating Dice-K twice, nor do I see them beating Beckett twice. I'll give them the Wakefield game and one against both Dice-K and Beckett, but they fall to series MVP Lester in 7.

The First Round: What the hell??? Part I

Okay, I managed to pick 3 of the 4 series correctly, but all of them had some unexpected turns, and except for the Rays vs. White Sox series, non went as I expected.

The highlight of the Rays vs. Sox series was the Balfour vs. Cabrera showdown which is the kind of thing you will remember for years. Balfour has now climbed into my favorite obscure players list. The rest of the series was pretty much chalk. The Sox managed to win one more game than I thought they would based solely on the strength of John Danks' start. That kid is really something and could turn into a Cy Young caliber pitcher in the coming years. Other than that, the Rays pitchers kept the Sox at bay and the young stars on the Rays, Upton and Longoria especially, shined brightly as they will for the next decade or so.

The most disappointing series would have to be the Cubs vs. Dodgers. This is the series I thought would be the best basically consisting of Manny vs. the Cubs pitching. Instead, it consisted of the Cubs completely laying an egg. Dempster and Harden picked a bad time to have bad starts, with Dempster completely losing his command, and Harden losing the dominance he had displayed most of this year. Looking back, Harden and Depster probably were not guys you wanted to trust to start in postseason games. Dempster does not have dominating stuff, and Harden has inconsistent command and no durability. But while these pitchers were bad, the Cubs lineup lost the series. They scored 6 runs. Unless you have Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, you will not win a playoff series in which you score 6 runs. Part of that is the fact that the Dodgers pitchers were excellent, part of that was that certain Cubs (Soriano, Ramirez, Soto) flat out choked, but mostly it was due to poor lineup construction. I said over a month ago that the fact that the Cubs did not have a superstar hitter could hurt them, and it did. Lee, the best hitter on the team, stepped up and hit over .500 in the series, but it was not enough. They made a mistake in playing the ice cold Fukodome, they made a bigger mistake in contructing a lineup whose two best left handed hitters are a 40 year old centerfielder, and their #1 starting pitcher. But the biggest mistake was giving superstar money to the extremely overrated Alfonso Soriano, and insisting on batting him leadoff despite the fact that he is completely the anti leadoff hitter.

A good leadoff hitter: has a high on base percentage, takes a good amount of walks, does not strikout much, gets a fair amount lot of extra base hits, but not a lot of homers, is a good baserunner who does not run into a lot of extra outs for the extra bases he takes. The two best leadoffmen ever, Rickey Henderson and Tim Raines, did all these things and did them well. Soriano is fast. Thats it. He strikes out way too much, does not get on base enough, and hits way too many homers to bat at the top. If the Cubs learned anything from this series, its that Soriano needs to move down, Theriot and Derosa need to move up, and they have to get more lefthaded bats.

The Brewers vs. Phillies series turned out about as expected with the somewhat large exception of CC Sabathia. Sabathia had a bad inning and two awful at bats with the Phillies star hitter: Brett Myers!!! Sabathia controlled Utley and Howard as expected and looked fairly sharp, he just could not handle the lesser hitters in the lineup. Game 5 could have been a classic if only the Brewers could have pulled it out. They also have some fixing to do. Their pitching should be fine as long as they can find one starter. If they can bring Sabathia back, that will solve a lot of the problems. The lineup, however will not be as easy to fix. Hart has to go, Weeks, and Hall could as well. They need to get a few more patient hitters because Hardy and Braun can't do it all by themselves.

Sox-Angels needs its own entry. coming soon.

The Boston Red Sox: The Clear World Series Favorites

Well, it looks like my preseason pick of the Cleveland Indians did not work out for the series although I still maintain that without a barrage of injuries it would have. Anyways it's time to reassess heading into the last week of the season.

In the NL you have the Cubs... And well, the Cubs. If the Marlins manage to get in, they will be dangerous, but they're five games back with less than 10 to play so it looks bad for them. Any of the other teams, while they may make an improbable run to the series, will be severely over matched by any of the AL teams excluding whoever wins Comedy Central.

That leaves the Sox, Rays, and Angels as contenders. Everyone loves the Angels, but I tend to disagree. TLAAOA have a good record in a terrible division, a guy who just set a record for the most of the stupidest statistical category there is in one season, and a manager everyone loves. What they don't have is a dominating team. The have scored only 704 runs, 10th in the AL in: awful, and they have allowed 639, 4th in the AL: decent but not great. Their run differential is 7th in the AL and worse than 4 of the teams in the AL East. The lineup consists of 2.5 good hitters, a few mediocre and the rest bad. The bench is bad. The bullpen is excellent, but will pitch at most 3-4 innings per game. They have one legit ace, 2 more solid starters, and 2 about average starters. They are a team built to succeed over a long season because they have good pitching for every day. They are not built to win in October which takes great hitting and even greater pitching. To top it off, this is nowhere near the best Angels team in the past 5 years, and none of them have done much in October, so why should this bunch?

The Rays are very young, but very talented. They possess a pitching staff about as good as TLAAOA, but a much better lineup. While they lack the up front star power of Guerrero and Teixeira, they have 8 guys who can all beat you starting with soon to be superstar Evan Longoria. Trust me, this is David Wright of the AL. The only legit out in the lineup is Bartlett and he's at least as good as Aybar, Matthews, and Mathis. The Rays will likely fall victim to the "No stars" or the "No experience" paradox. Both have been overcome with young talent by the '03 Marlins and the '02 Angels, but usually you need one or the other.

Which brings me to the team of the '00s, the Boston Red Sox. They look ready to go for their 3rd title in 5 years as they have all the pieces to the puzzle. A solid lineup with plenty of playoff experience, a solid bench, the best closer in baseball other than Rivera and maybe Nathan, and a 3 man rotation of Beckett, Lester, and Matsuzaka. The keys are David Ortiz and even more importantly Josh Beckett.

As Curt Schilling, the best big game pitcher of his generation put it, "Beckett is the best big game pitcher in the game today." He certainly has a great track record: 2 postseasons, 2 world series rings, 2 postseason MVP awards. Beckett's career postseason numbers are some of the best ever: 6-2, 1.73 ERA, 0.74 WHIP, 10.2 K/9. Even in his two losses, he has yet to have a bad postseason outing. By comparison, his numbers are better than John Smoltz, Curt Schilling, Randy Johnson, Jack Morris, Sandy Koufax, and are even close to playoff superstar Mariano Rivera.

Ortiz is also excellent his career postseason line is .317/.418/.587, and if you throw out the time before he got to Boston, it's an even more impressive .325/.443/.613, among the best of all time for those with over 150 PAs.

Anything can happen in a short series, but Boston has got to be the odds on favorite to repeat as champs.

I got one right

While the vast majority of my predictions have gone to hell, I got some stuff right like as of right now the entire NL Central. But the one I am most proud of is my sleeper pick of Tampa Bay. Here's what I wrote back in March:

Tampa Bay
Sooner or later all those #1 picks are going to pan out and I think it's this year. Pena, Crawford, Upton, and Longoria will be an amazing lineup and if they can get Balldelli to stay in one piece, it's even better. The pitching is turning around too with Kazmir, Shields, and Garza with even more waiting in the minors. It's probably a stretch for this team to contend this year, but Boston and New York better watch out in '09 and '10.

They surprised even me with how good they played this year, and Boston and New York could be in for a very long next 5 years in the murderous AL East. Man, it really sucks to be the Orioles.