Meandering Through the Bronx

So if the stars are lining up for the Phillies in the NL; what about the AL? It's not so cut-and-dried, but baseball fans disregard the Yankees at their own peril.

If you pay attention to the past, you realize three things:

1. How a team finishes the regular season is absolutely no guide to how they will perform in the playoffs.

2. Most theories about who has the edge (e.g., they have more playoff experience) are crap.

3. The past is only occasionally prologue to the present.

The Yankees cruised to a runner-up finish with starting pitchers like Somebody Nova and Somebody-else Moseley while they bottle-fed Andy Pettitte back into the rotation. This is a franchise that has in past years gotten bored of the regular season once the post-season became a fait accompli. They will be at maximum strike force for the Twins, even if, as Wild Card, they're made to suffer on the road, in frigid weather, against a superior foe (relative to Texas.)

The Rangers are in much-improved position to win with their MVP-candidate left-fielder back in the fold, but they suffer the curse of the egalitarian staff, which doesn't seem to correlate with playoff success. Though Texas will suit up an 11-man pitching contingent that includes just two hurlers whose ERAs top 4.00 (Dustin Nippert, 4.20 and Matt Harrison, 4.71), no one after Cliff Lee raises any eyebrows from opposing sluggers. A deep staff with no clear star gets a team to the post-season, but doesn't have a history of keeping them there long.

Not that their first opponent, the Rays, are riding any great wave. The starters, Tampa's iron fist most of the season, tailed off badly in the last month, in several cases reaching well past their Verducci levels. Wade Davis pitched 100 more innings than he ever had before; David Price 80 more. Jeff Niemann and James Shields showed repeatedly that they had nothing left in the second half. While Yankee hurlers have been coasting, their Ray counterparts may be sucking wind.

There are plenty of good arguments for the Rays, Twins and Rangers to win trips to the World Series. Short playoff series are notoriously fickle and the four contestants are relatively evenly matched. Still, New York is unique among them in not yet considering their season a success. The AL championship goes through the Bronx, even if no clinching game ever does.

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