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The 2010 edition of the Toronto Blue Jays was full of surprises, and provided many promising glimpses into the team's future. Whether or not anyone besides Blue Jays fans noticed is another matter entirely.

The Jays were widely expected to finish at the bottom of baseball's toughest, deepest division, the mighty AL East. They only wound up one spot above the basement, but they also went 85-77, the kind of thing that can only happen in the AL East.

As expected, the Pittsburgh Pirates showed manager John Russell the door late Monday morning.

No matter the reasons or excuses, you just cannot lose 300 games in three seasons and expect to keep your dugout job in any level of baseball.

General manager Neil Huntington says that the search for a replacement for Russell has already begun in organizational meetings in Bradenton, Florida.

It would be easy, and appropriate, to enjoy the afterglow of the Giants' NL West division title by merely acknowledging the usual suspects: Aubrey Huff, Andres Torres, Brian Wilson, Buster Posey, Pat Burrell, Juan Uribe...

Wow. It is indeed a long list.

But it seems more suitable to tip the cap to two men who put that list of players together and made it click.

Last year in the playoffs, Alex Rodriguez was outstanding for the New York Yankees.  He carried the team through the American League Division Series and the American League Championship Series.  Although he struggled in the first few games of the World Series against the Philadelphia Phillies last year, he had several key hits to help the Yankees become World Series Champions.

Heading into the 2010 season, this is a team that many had pegged to compete with the Philadelphia Phillies for the division title.

It's safe to say that a few things went wrong.

After finishing 79-83, the Mets are now coming off their second straight disappointing season and are a team in crisis. Sure, the dismissals of General Manager Omar Minaya and Manager Jerry Manuel will appease some fans, but it certainly won't solve any of the team's woes.

Each October, eight teams compete to prove who is the best baseball team in North America.

This year, the New York Yankees, Tampa Bay Rays, Texas Rangers, Minnesota Twins, Philadelphia Phillies, Cincinnati Reds, San Francisco Giants, and the Atlanta Braves will try to prove their mettle in the postseason.

It's not necessarily the best regular season team that will win: whichever team is best built for the playoffs will come out victorious.

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There have been a lot of people that have been pretty down on the Yankees lately. It’s hard to blame them—down the stretch the Yankees managed a pathetic 9-17 record.

Fortunately, there are reasons to be optimistic. Just compare the recent slide to the 2000 Yankees who won the World Series, and it’s easy to see why.

Those Yankees started the season 82-58 before tanking down the stretch to a 5-16 record that raised giant red flags. Things were bad—real bad.

The words "superstar" and "Pittsburgh Pirates" haven't gone together since a young kid named Barry Bonds was making his clean mark on Major League Baseball as a five-tool left fielder during the Pirate's last winning season. That seems like a lifetime ago, when in reality it was roughly 20 years. Hard to believe that there are children in college who weren't born yet the last time the Pirates were any good or had a superstar.

WhatIfSports.com utilizes its award-winning baseball simulation engine to present the most comprehensive and unbiased ranking possible of all 30 teams in baseball each Monday during the regular season. To come up with the rankings, using only their statistical performance to date this season, each team is simulated against every other team 100 times (50 at home and 50 away) so that all five pitchers in the current rotation start 10 times at each location.

I would like to congratulate New Yorkers, Mets fans, and fans of baseball in general for our reward today, Oct. 4th.

The sport of baseball will forever be better off without Omar Minaya running the Mets.

It is going to be difficult to hire a general manager who will want to deal with Fred and Jeff Wilpon and the mess that is the New York Mets.