I like baseball, plain and simple. I don't necessarily have a Major League team that I call mine. The nearest that I have to that would probably be the Los Angeles Angels, because of their affiliation with my team the Salt Lake Bees. I actually get to watch some of those players play when one of them might have a Triple A assignment.Most importantly, I just like watching the game being played, almost regardless of who is playing it. I like the strategy element of baseball that other sports seem to me to be lacking. Though I don't follow the standings of the MLB all season long, I do check in with the scoreboard page every so often throughout the summer. I do this with my eyes looking ahead to right now... October!This past week I watched or listened to nearly every single game in each division series. I was a little disappointed in that it was too easy to see what teams would be moving on.
In the Twins and Athletics match up, I expected much more out of that series. All of those games were so very close to almost being fun and exciting, but all of them fell short at the Twins expense.
As for the Dodgers and Mets series I would have like to see the Dodgers come through. If only for the sake of one of my co-workers, who claims to be a huge Dodger fan, who kept saying to me after each game that he was going to run out and buy himself a hat with an L.A. on it, and that was all that the Dodgers needed to start on their win streak. Needless to say, he never showed up to work in one of those shiny blue hats.
The Cardinals and the Padres gave me a little bit more of what I want to see in a playoff series (competition), but not much. I was pulling for the Padres because of some childhood experiences of going to some Padres games at Jack Murphy Stadium (They now play at PETCO Park). But, it was fairly obvious, with the exception of that one game, that the Cardinals were the better team.
Though I don't claim to have a team that is mine, there is one team that I will always route against, the Wal-Mart of baseball, the New York Yankees. It is good to see them eliminated from the post season in the first round once again. When everyone expects them to win no matter what, I love it when they don't! This is the series that stirred up the most energy in me. How could so many dismiss the Detroit Tigers after their amazing season they just pulled through, granted they slumped a bit at the end there and just barely made the wild card spot.
Overall, I would have liked to see at least one of those match ups go to the full 5 games, but we didn't, and now it is time to move on to the championship series. I expect the A's and Tigers games to be much more enthralling than the games we have seen thus far this post season. The same goes for the Cardinals and Mets.
I do not care as much about who wins it all, as I do that whom ever is contending gives the watchers (like me) something to watch. With the momentum as I see it, I am picking the Detroit Tigers to take the World Series against the New York Mets. I invite you to pile up a dog with whatever you like on it, and watch to see what will happen.
Labels: Baseball, Essay, MLB
