A Fool’s Baseball Predictions

“It measures just 9 inches in circumference, weighs only about 5 ounces, and it is made of cork wound with woolen yarn, covered with two layers of cowhide, and stiched by hand precisely 216 times.
It travels 60 feet 6 inches from the pitcher’s mound to home–and it can cover that distance at nearly 100 miles an hour. Along the way it can be made to twist, spin, curve, wobble, rise, or fall away.
The bat is made of turned ash, less than 42 inches long, not more than 2 3/4 inches in diameter. The batter has only a few thousandths of a second to decide to hit the ball. And yet the men who fail seven times out of ten are considered the game’s greatest heroes.
It is played everywhere. In parks and playground and prison yards. In back alleys and farmers fields. By small children and by old men. By raw amateurs and millionare professionals. It is a leisurely game that demands blinding speed. The only game where the defense has the ball. It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime and ending with the hard facts of autumn.
Americans have played baseball for more than 200 years, while they conquered a continent, warred with one another and with enemies abroad, struggled over labor and civil rights and the meaning of freedom.
At the games’s heart lie mythic contradictions: a pastoral game, born in crowded cities; an exhilarating democratic sport that tolerates cheating and has excluded as many as it has included; a profoundly conservative game that sometimes manages to be years ahead of its time.
It is an American odyssey that links sons and daughters to father and grandfathers. And it reflects a host of age-old American tensions: between workers and owners, scandal and reform, the individual and the collective.
It is a haunted game, where each player is measured by the ghosts of those who have gone before. Most of all, it is about time and timelessness, speed and grace, failure and loss, imperishable hope, and coming home.”

Baseball is back.

Anyone who makes predictions about a complex system like the baseball season is a fool. We only talk about our predictions when they come true. Here are this fool’s predictions:

AL East                                  AL Central                       AL West
Yankees                                Tigers                                Angels
Red Soxs*                            Indians*                           Rangers
Blue Jays                              Royals                              Athletics
Rays                                      White Sox                        Mariners
Orioles                                  Twins

NL East                                 NL Central                    NL West
Phillies                                  Brewers                         Dodgers
Marlins                                 Cardinals*                     Diamondbacks*
Braves                                   Reds                               Giants
Nationals                             Cubs                                Rockies
Mets                                      Pirates                            Padres
Astros

*indicates a Wild Card team

AL MVP: Prince Fielder
AL Cy Young: C.J. Wilson

NL MVP: Matt Kemp
NL Cy Young: Cole Hamels

AL Champion: Tigers
NL Champion: Cardinals

World Series Champion: Tigers

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