Tagged As: baseball, MLB, Sports, Red Sox, Mets, Yankees, Cubs

Baseball is a wonderful sport for a few reasons. The first is that the game is played at a leisurely pace. Many people may hate this, but how many people would like to run several miles a day in 90 degree weather that is oftentimes humid in constricting cotton uniforms with optimal body coverage. My simple sense of humanitarianism would make feel guilty while I tried to enjoy my gloriously cold beer in the bleachers while watching a man literally kill himself on the field below me. The second is that it is a game nerds and geeks love for the simple fact that it is a game where the law of averages reigns supreme. These laws lead to certain results that cannot be denied. So, the question is: what certainties do we have to look forward to this season?

MLB Certainty No. 1:

Manny Ramirez will immediately revert to the brooding, selfish ball player once he realizes he can no longer leverage another team against his current one (suck it Boras). For all the talk about Ramirez getting along with Torre I find it hard to believe that a team as seemingly loose as the Boston Red Sox were really that terrible to play with.

If he had said that he simply hated the New England chill every October I would feel more sympathy for a player set to make $45 million over the next two years. I think that the Los Angeles Dodgers needed him, but I wonder what excuse he will come up with to be angry midway through the season. The Giants survived under the temperamental psyche of Barry Bonds, can the Dodgers do the same?

MLB Certainty No. 2:

The New York Yankees will make a blockbuster midseason trade. The front office showed a willingness to spend again this summer. It came out of nowhere because we baseball dorks were so ready to accept that the Yankees could not go on with the culture they had created. We were wrong. The Yankees took to the free agent market like a 16-year-old girl at the mall with her parents’ credit card.

At the very least the Yankees cleared house. They will probably need another asset to make it over the now two-team hump in the AL East, the Red Sox and the Tampa Bay Rays. I immediately checked the Pittsburgh Pirates roster (open for business in June) upon this realization and noticed that potential star Nate McLouth would look nice playing in centerfield instead of Brett Gardner.

MLB Certainty No. 3:

The Chicago Cubs will win 100 games in the pathetic NL Central and lose to whichever pathetic NL West team advances to the postseason. In 2007 it was the Diamondbacks, in 2008 it was the Dodgers, and it in 2009 it will be whichever club can claw out of the division.

This is not just a historical curse thing. I actually have a decent reason to believe this season. The Cubs starters are great, the lineup is amazing, and the closer is scary. However, I do not see a real good option for left handed relief. The Cubs only need one thing to go wrong before they fold like a paper tiger and this could be the reason in 2009. I am waiting for southpaw Neal Cotts to bring about the sorrow and the fury that has become so commonplace in Wrigleyville in October.

MLB Certainty No. 4:

The Chicago White Sox will win the AL Central. This is not a Chicago-centric thing. It is because the overwhelming majority of experts are pretty down on the Sox this season. They have good reason, but the Sox work under this odd principle that they must defy expectations, good or bad.

In 2005 the team was supposed to finish fourth. Instead they went 99-63 and won the World Series. In 2006 and 2007 they were supposed to repeat in the central. In 2006 they went 90-72, but finished third in the standings and in 2007 they bombed the season with a 72-90 record. Even last year they were supposed to be a fourth place team, yet they won the division.

MLB Certainty No. 5:

The New York Mets will again play the role of the little brother as the media and the MLB front office ignore their promise for another chance to shine the light on the Yankees. MLB and the sports media need sports fans to want to watch and care about baseball and they will turn to a signature franchise, the Yankees in the media capital of the world, in this time of economic struggles and a steroids issue that will not die.

If anyone has any doubt, let’s go back to last season when the Mets were playing their last season at Shea and were actually more competitive than the Yankees. It was only after it became clear that the last season at Yankees Stadium was not going to include a postseason that the rest of the baseball-verse turned its attention to the Mets who were in a dogfight for first place. Look for much of the same this season with the lamentation over the last season at Yankees Stadium being replaced with elation over New Yankees Stadium and the dismissal of the new home to the Mets, Citi Field.

I think, albeit very early on, that the Mets are probably the best team in the city, but the first Yankees-Red Sox series will easily quiet any mention of the Mets until the Yankees are out of the playoffs. If only the Mets had won the 2000 World Series this all might be different.

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