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| Please read my picks while I make a pit stop at Walgreens. (Ed Leyro/Studious Metsimus) |
What's good, kids? This is Joey Beartran and we've reached baseball's final four. And unfortunately, this year's pair of League Championship Series feature quite a few teams that I did not predict to advance this far. In fact, the only team that did make it to the LCS as I foretold was the Houston Astros.
Batting .250 in the division series round means that I have some work to do to improve as a fearless forecaster. But at least I can make myself feel better by saying I had a better chance of picking a winner in the last round than Hall of Famer and franchise legend Gary Carter had of collecting a base hit as a member of the New York Mets. (He hit .249 while wearing the racing stripes and shooting Ivory Soap commercials.)
This year's National and American League Championship Series feature intriguing matchups. In the Senior Circuit, we have the Washington Nationals, who are making their first NLCS appearance since moving to our nation's capital from Montreal and just the second final four appearance in the 51-year history of the Expos/Nationals franchise. Their opponent, the St. Louis Cardinals, have appeared in 14 League Championship Series since the Expos/Nats last played in one. The Redbirds are also making their 11th NLCS appearance in the last 24 seasons.
Moving over to the A.L., we have the New York Yankees, who are playing in their 1,000th League Championship Series in club history, according to what their fans say. They'll be taking on the Houston Astros, a team which is appearing in its third consecutive ALCS. This is also a rematch of the 2017 battle for the American League pennant, a series won by Houston in seven games.
Will the Cardinals win their 20th National League pennant or will the Nationals win their first? Can Houston make its third World Series appearance of the 21st century and second in three seasons? And how many times will Yankee fans remind us of their ringzzzzz?
You can either watch these four-plus hour contests that feature starters pitching in relief and 20,000 or so home runs (by coincidence, that's the same number of division titles the Yankees have, which must be true because I was assured of that fact by a long-time Yankee fan who said he knows everything about the team since he became a fan in 1996) or you can just read my predictions below while pondering just how many words I can fit in one sentence. (Run-on sentence much?)
I'd take the "read my predictions" option if I were you.
National League Championship Series
Washington Nationals vs. St. Louis Cardinals
Although the Cardinals have home field advantage because they were a division champion, the Nationals actually finished with the better record (93-69, while the Cards were 91-71). However, it was St. Louis that won the season series in this matchup, taking five of seven against Washington.
Nationals ace Max Scherzer was defeated twice by the Cardinals by identical 5-1 scores, while Washington's bats hit the snooze button in their regular season meetings with St. Louis, scoring just 17 runs in the seven games.
But that was a different Nationals team. This group of Nats come back from two-run, eighth-inning deficits in wild card games instead of choking postseason advancement away as per the usual Washington script. This group of Nationals erase two-games-to-one deficits in a best-of-five series and take future Hall of Fame pitchers deep on back-to-back pitches in the late innings of do-or-die games. For everything this group of Washingtonians does now, there's one thing the team no longer does.
They don't pay Bryce Harper's salary.
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| These Nats don't choke. (Greg Fiume/Getty Images) |
Basically, all the Nationals had to do was cut ties with the hair-flipping Papelbonian punching bag and they were destined to win a playoff series and perhaps two.
The Nationals won't win this series because the pitching firm of Scherzer, Strasburg and Corbin will keep the Cardinals' already low .245 batting average in check. They also won't win because their relievers won't get the chance to blow leads if they're hardly ever used. Nope. All they need is the knowledge that Bryce Harper is busy playing golf and getting another one of his managers fired (the 2020 season will see Harper playing under his sixth different skipper in nine seasons) and that'll be enough to advance to the franchise's first World Series.
Prediction: Nationals in 7.
American League Championship Series
New York Yankees vs. Houston Astros
The Yankees can only win when they outslug you. It's true. When they scored five runs or fewer, their record was 31-53. We're not talking about being 22 games under .500 when they score no more than two runs. We're talking FIVE RUNS OR FEWER. And even when they scored half a dozen runs or more, they still managed to lose six times.
Considering that New York will now be facing a dominant Houston pitching staff that held its opponents to four runs or fewer in 112 games (for all you kids out there, that's more than two-thirds of the games they played), it's going to be very difficult for the Yankees to keep up with the Astros.
Oh, and since we're on the topic of pitching, allow me to remind you that the Yankees allowed five runs or more in nearly half of their games (72 out of 162) and will now be facing an Astros lineup that averaged 5.7 runs per contest.
The Yankees have a great past. But it's the Astros who have a great present and future. And looking a week into the future, I see the Astros playing in the World Series.
Predictions: Astros in 6.
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| If S.I. says it, then it has to be true. (courtesy Sports Illustrated) |
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