Beaneater

I'd like to see Bogaerts get in this game and get his first taste of playoffs in a controlled environment.

Oh, he will, he will. There's a guy on second.

4.1 IP, 7 R. I'm soooooo scared of the Rays' gigantic insurmountable pitching advantage. Now let's go burn their 'pen.

Quick inning would be really beautiful here, Jonny.

And may you also be wrong on many of your other predictions!

Well, now that the extended regular season is over, it's time to get out our crystal balls and goat entrails and predict the future. I absolutely stink at predictions (though I did go 7-for-7 in the 2007 postseason, for what that's worth). But I'll go ahead and be the first to make a fool of myself. All the standard caveats apply: the playoffs are a crapshoot, blah blah blah. In the end, the Sox have the best record in the majors (tied with the Cards) in arguably the toughest division, and the best run diffie. We have a great postseason rotation and the ability to score runs by the boatload. There's no particular weakness in the team that dooms them to postseason failure. Which doesn't mean that they couldn't lose three straight to the Guardians, but that's not so probable. So the fact that I picked the Sox to win it all is probably equal parts "total homer" and "the Sox are really good". OK, 60% "total homer". AL Wild Card Rays over Guardians Comment: Cobb vs. a team that can't beat good teams. I'd love the Guardians to win but I'm not feeling it. ALDS #1 Sox over Rays Comment: Handled them in the regular season and we will handle them in the postseason. ALDS #2 A's over Tigers Comment: If Scherzer throws one stinker or Cabrera isn't 100% right, the Tigers could be in trouble. I just see more failure modes for the Tigers than the A's. ALCS Sox over A's Comment: The two best teams in the AL in an epic deathmatch. Should be fun! NL Wild Card Pirates over Reds Comment: Reds are fading, it seems, and the Pirates are pretty dang good at home. NLDS #1 Pirates over Cards Comment: Yeah, the Cards are obviously going to win this series, but I have to pick an upset somewhere, don't I? NLDS #2 Dodgers over Braves Comment: Sniff. I pull for the Braves, but they probably don't have the horses to compete here. Truth be told, though, both the NL East and the NL West are total jokes. Who knows whether either of these teams are really any good? The weird thing is that the Dodgers actually finished with a losing record in the pathetic NL West but crushed the potent NL Central... NLCS Dodgers over Pirates Comment: Which sets up... World Series Sox over Dodgers Comment: Nick Punto makes the final out and Uehara gives high-fives whose seismic potency rattles the space-time continuum and ushers in the Mayan apocalypse 10 months late.

I would have figured that Ellsbury would be playing every game now -- this is his rehab, after all. Anyone know why he's not in the lineup?

Oh, right. Well, other that I was right. Thanks, by the way, for not saying, "Check your $@%&ing facts, you giant pulsating ball of phlegm!" as sometimes happens here. I appreciate that.

There's no point in letting Lackey go because he's making $11.75 next year and leading the team (among qualifiers) in ERA. So he will be back.

Man, a win tonight would be huge. A loss tonight means we've got no cushion -- against the O's we have to equal whatever the A's do in Seattle. A win and we've got breathing room. If the O's keep us from getting the #1 seed I will officially hate them more than the Rays.

You know, for some odd reason I hadn't thought of the fact that we'll be playing the O's without Machado. Plus, like you said, we've got our playoff rotation lined up; no filler. And by then the O's won't have anything to play for except the joy of knocking us out of the #1 seed. We do know they enjoy that role, but you have to like our chances to rack up a bunch of wins here. Hopefully starting tonight vs. S. Tyler Chatwood III, Esq.

Oof. No kidding. Looks like the Sox get an automatic W for game 2... unless the infamous reverse lock decides to come into play.

We'd have the shortest right side of the infield in baseball history. It'd be worth it just for that.

Yeah, but he threw a ball. That's bordering on unacceptable.

Jbj!!!! EDIT: I like how the site edited both VA's and my J B J to Jbj.

Braves have always been my NL team (born in SC, spent many years in Richmond attending Braves AAA games, etc.). I'd be really happy to see them beat someone other than the Sox in the WS. Don't really care one way or another about the Cards, Reds, or Pirates (other than, in Pittsburgh's case, just generally liking to see the underdogs do well). Dislike the Dodgers for some reason but agree that a Sox/Dodgers WS would be some sort of spectacular karmic explosion.

Love the thread title. With all due respect to mvp, I'm not sure I want the Yankees out. They suuuuuuuck. Finding ourselves serendipitously facing the Yanks in the postseason would be like finding a gold nugget in your McFries. That is to say, odd and disconcerting but highly profitable. There is no more Yankees mystique and we would beat them to a pulp the way we did in the regular season. On the other hand, you're probably right. It'd be better all around if they just stay home and inject roids under their tongues (A-Rod), eat Bavarian creams (Sabathia and the whole bullpen), or whatever else they've got planned. The team I want out of the playoffs is the O's. They play us tough every time and win more often than not, at least recently. I do not want to see them in October.

That's right.

I was checking the standings the other day, looking especially at run differential, not just by individual team, but by whole divisions. Presumably when two divisional rivals play, the total run differential is always 0. So a division's total run differential is really just a way of expressing its run differential against all the other divisions. As of this morning, here are the total divisional run differentials: AL East: +207 AL Central: +25 AL West: -138 NL East: -160 NL Central: +185 NL West: -119 Not exactly rocket science, but still illustrative. The AL East doesn't have any horrible teams (trust the Yankees to be 8 games over .500 with a -15 diffie... must be that Yankee mystique or something). Neither does the NL Central. Well, the Brewers and Cubs have awful records but their diffies aren't totally embarrassing. It does make me fear the A's a little bit less, seeing numbers that quantify how lame their division is. And it makes me wonder how much the Braves are for real. Crunching the numbers again, by league: AL: +94 NL: -94 (obviously) Take that for what it's worth.

Another thing to see in our recent play (not that this insight is especially brilliant) is who we did it against. SF's not great, but they were at home on the West Coast. LAD was incandescent. BAL and NYY are wild card contenders. Admittedly, CHW blows and a half-decent team would not have gotten swept in that series. DET is very very good, and TB is in current possession of a wild card. So we're pounding the patsies and more than holding our own against good teams. Sure, luck has factored in. We've missed some of the opposing teams' aces, like Kershaw and Sale (though he has to throw a CG to get a win, judging by the results vs. NYY). We've hit 173-foot grand slams (Napoli say thanks, Yankee Stadium). But then we've also just matched up, strength to strength, and won (i.e. Scherzer vs. Lester). So it looks like we're going to win the division. We're scoring runs and we have a fearsome 4 man postseason rotation. We all know the playoffs are a crapshoot, but let's just say there's no one saying, "Man, I hope we end up playing the Red Sox!"

This isn't just about pitching, but I love that the Sox are tearing it up this year without doing anything really unsustainable. Who's having a career year? Well, Buchholz -- although he's having more like 45% of a career year, and he's got a history of being good when he can pitch. And Carp... off the bench, so it's not like he's the daily difference maker. And Uehara, though honestly he's been really really really good whenever he can get on the mound during his whole career. And I guess no one really expected Lackey to be this good, though it's not out of line with his best years in LA. Victorino's the only regular position player I can think of who's really doing far more than you'd expect. The Sox have a got a very good team heading in to the next couple of years. As opposed to recent years when we needed positive excellence from the FO, it seems to me that for a couple of years we'll just need the FO not to do anything bone-headed. It's a nice place to be.

Like mvp just said, we have a fine postseason rotation lined up. I think you could make a case for any of the top 4 guys starting. It's a nice problem to have. My gut says it goes Lester - Buchholz - Peavy - Lackey. No disrespect to Lackey and his excellent season intended. It's nice to imagine some team lining up their mediocre 4th starter while we toss Lackey out on the mound.

What a fun board! I express my joy at seeing the young Sox take it to the Yanks, and you and Thunder jump on me from opposite directions about the definition of "farmhand". Thanks for making Talksox the happy community it is! If you're so bent on imagining and then correcting errors in other people's posts, maybe you should proofread your own posts... unless you really think we have two players named Nava. And "et al." should have a period after it, since it's an abbreviation. But who would be so ridiculous as to point out things like that?

At least there's not too much right field for Nava to patrol in the Toilet. Just about 15-20 feet of grass between the basepaths and the warning track, or so it seems.

I think Lester wants to work quickly today, and he was afraid that if Naps and Victorino were in the lineup, the top halves of the innings would take too long. So he asked Farrell to arrange things so the Sox stay under 20 runs. Makes sense.