By now I don’t need to tell you how silly it is to predict the outcome of a baseball season in which over 2,400 baseball games are played by over a thousand players, all of whom are subject to injury and/or wild variation from past performance or reasonable expectations. Baseball is freakin’ chaos, my friends. And while that is one of the top things to recommend it, it’s also the thing that makes predicting its outcomes a fool’s errand.
Let no one say that Bill and I aren’t fools. We’re gonna make our picks anyway, because that’s what we do. You can see our top-to-bottom divisional picks in our individual previews, but know that we have the following teams winning divisions and wild cards:
AL East: Red Sox
AL Central: Royals
AL West: Astros
AL Wild Cards: Blue Jays, Rangers
NL East: Mets
NL Central: Cubs
NL West: Dodgers
NL Wild Cards: Pirates, Giants
We diverge a bit on our playoff/World Series picks:
Bill: Red Sox vs. Astros in the ALCS; Mets vs. Cubs in the NLCS. Cubs vs. Astros in the World Series and . . . CUBS WIN
Craig: Red Sox vs. Royals in the ALCS; Giants vs. Cubs in the NLCS. Giants vs. Red Sox in the World Series and . . . GIANTS WIN
No, I don’t think the Giants are the best team in baseball. I was just burned in 2010, 2012 and 2014 by them and I’ve decided that going with dumb even year juju is a better system than one in which I pretend I know anything. Honestly, if someone put a gun to my head I’d probably pick the Cubs or Red Sox, but everyone’s gonna do that this year and where’s the fun in that?
Obviously, based on that bit of incoherence, Don’t take this exercise terribly seriously. No battle plan survives engagement with the enemy and such. If you save these and throw them back in our faces come October, well, you’re sort of missing the point. Unless we’re right, of course, in which point we’ll make a big show of how right we were because we control the posts that go up on this website and our egos are very, very fragile.
Anyway, there is only one thing you can definitively take away from this: we hate your team. Yes, yours. And yours too. God, how can you root for them?