[MLB Baseball] MLBallabalooza

ED: I thought I would never see the day, but Dom got off his arse and actually wrote a post. This is amazing. Dom has given a run down of this years contenders for the World Series and a few little bits and pieces to help newbies understand some of the lingo. So read on...

Hello Kids. I'm Gibbs and this will be the Major League Baseball section of the best BLOG on the net.

MLB is set up very much like NFL with two conferences called Leagues, American and National, and three divisions within each conference, East, Central and West [Ed: Actually the NFL has two conferences with FOUR divisions with exactly four teams in each]. So now you’ll know what im talking about when I say ALW or NLC. My early season predictions are as follows. From West to East, American League First.

The ALW is a strange little div. Unlike the other divisions it only has 4 teams, Texas, Oakland, Seattle and Anahiem [Ed: Anaheim are now the Los Angeles Angels]. They are all strong, and Seattle picked up the most offense over the off-season, but Texas have the best all-round team and great pitching led by veteran country & western singer Kenny Rogers. They also have former Yankee talisman Alfonso Soriano, who is one of the best lead-off (hits first in the batting line-up – mucho important job done by the best hitters in the game) men in the business.

Minnesota will clean up the ALC. Why? They always do.

And the very hotly contested ALE. The Yankees, last seasons unbelievable champions Boston, The Tampa Bay Devil Rays, former champions the Toronto Blue Jays and my dark horse pick of the year, The Baltimore Orioles. This will be a toughy and the most hotly contested division in all sports. The Yankees are incredible (I’ll do a special ode to them in a future entry), the Red Sox are Mutton dressed as Lamb , and the Orioles are the most underrated team in the majors. My pick – Yankees.

NLW its gonna be a dogfight between Barry “I don’t took no drugs” Bonds’ San Francisco Giants and the slap happy LA Dodgers with the second best (some might say best) closer in baseball, and everybody's favourite Quebecian, Eric Gagne. A closer is a pitcher who comes in usually in the last or second to last innings to “save” the game. However, the result is only a “save” if the leading team is ahead by less than 4 runs. So if the Dodgers were to thump everyone by 5 runs every game they win, Gagne wouldn’t play at all.

NLC. This is gonna be a nice little fight between perennial heavy weights the Chicago Cubs and last seasons beaten finalists, the St Louis Cardinals. My pick is the Cubs. Since they got rid of Sammy “one-dimensional” Sosa and his massive contract, they’ve picked up some good players to help what is probably the finest rotation (set of five pitchers who pitch for a team) in MLB. Led by Mark Prior and Kerry Wood, look for them to get an early lead and hold on to it. The Cards, led by all star all-rounder Albert Pujols (pronounced POO-HOLES, damned unlucky that) will again be strong but lost a few players to free agency and will find the Cubs too hot to handle. The Astros will also push and may have a late season flurry but I just don’t know. They might surprise me and the Killer Bees (Bagwell, Biggio, Berkman) will have sensational seasons, but they whole organisation just appears old.

The last division, NLW, will be a nice little two horse race between the Atlanta Braves and the Florida Marlins. My pick – Florida, lots a hitting, pitching could be better but they just have the hitting in Mike Lowell, Juan Pierre, Carlos Beltran, Miguel Cabrera and the pitcher who was hitting 1.000 (batting average, 7-7) last year, Dontrelle Willis aka – The D-Train.
Wild Cards? Baltimore and Boston will fight it out with Seattle and Anaheim in the AL. While San Francisco, St Louis, Houston, Atlanta and the Diamondbacks from Arizona will tussle in the National.