2010 MLB Playoffs

Now, that’s more like it.

This is the Rays that folks are used to seeing. They won with great pitching and timely hitting this entire season.  After failing to do that for the first two games of the playoffs, they found their formula in staving off elimination Saturday afternoon.

The Rays received a great starting pitching performance by Matt Garza, and they got the hits to tie the game late and then take the lead. Joaquin Benoit and Rafael Soriano did the rest by closing it out.

There is all this talk about Yankees skipper Joe Girardi walking away after the season and taking the job as the next Cubs manager.

But if the Bombers win a consecutive championship, they have to keep him, right?

I know that many Yankees fans have questioned Girardi's managerial skills. Heck, if you check with most fans they will point to one reason or another why they do not like their manager.

Entering the MLB postseason, analysts and other fans of the sports seemed to be skeptical of the New York Yankees chances to repeat their World Championship run from last year. Much of this skepticism centered around the lack of quality pitching following CC Sabathia in the rotation.

However, in the Yankees sweep of the Minnesota Twins Sabathia's win ended up being the weakest performance, as Andy Pettitte and Phil Hughes pulled strung together very strong performance in their respective wins.

In 2009, Davis enjoyed a taste of the bigs with a September call up.  In 2010, Davis is getting more than a taste, as the Rays turn to their 25-year-old rookie right hander to keep their playoff hopes alive.  Davis will make his postseason debut against one of the most fearsome offenses in baseball.  Oh yeah, there's this teeny tiny bit of pressure about a must-win game if the Rays season isn't to end.

The New York Yankees are the first team to advance in the postseason this year with their 6-1 win over the Minnesota Twins, who will spend another long, cold winter trying to figure out what went wrong again.

The Yankees dominated the Twins in all aspects of the game and appear poised to retain their title as World Series Champions.

Congratulations to the New York Yankees for sweeping the Minnesota Twins and moving on to the American League Championship series.

Well at least Joe Mauer, Jim Thome, and the rest of the Minnesota Twins will be well rested. They only needed to put in 27 innings of postseason baseball.

After the Twins clinched the AL Central division title on September 21, manager Ron Gardenhire put the team on cruise control allowing his regulars to rest and get healthy.

My friends always ask me how I know all the words to every song on the radio.  I explain to them that I was raised on the radio.  I have spent an incredible amount of time in my life either in a tractor or in the barn, where whatever radio station comes in basically waged a war of attrition on my ears.

It has also led me to a conclusion:  Baseball was made for the radio—more specifically, postseason baseball was made for the radio.

Phillip Joseph Hughes, better known simply as Phil Hughes, has had a very tumultuous career thus far and has hurdled many challenges on his way to his postseason starting debut tonight in the Bronx.

In high school, Hughes was a first team All-American pitcher, while posting a combined 21-1 record between his junior and senior years, including a perfect game.

Conventional wisdom heading into last night's game seemed to suggest that Roy Halladay's historic Game 1 masterpiece might have provided a devastating psychological edge in the Phillies-Reds NLDS series. 

The thinking was that the Reds might be demoralized to the point of believing they had no chance in the series, especially as they were staring at the back two-thirds of "The Big Three." And, conversely, the Phillies would be brimming with the necessary confidence and energy to overwhelm their rivals.