Fan News

Bud Selig has not done much right in his tenure as commissioner of Major League Baseball.

He has overseen the first-ever cancellation of the World Series and the first ever tie in the All Star game (in his former team's venue, no less). His tenure brought the steroid era to a feverish pitch and damaged the hallowed records of baseball, as well as the worst disparity of the haves and have-nots the game has ever experienced.

It took until the last day of the season, but the Giants won the NL West. Their reward? A first round match-up against the Atlanta Braves.

The Braves will have a massive emotional investment in the postseason with Bobby Cox retiring at the year's end, and it gets no easier if they win. With a dynamic Reds offense and an uber-talented Phillies team waiting next round, a World Series victory seems a distant hope.

In the parlance of that iconic psychedelic rock band, The Grateful Dead, the 2010 Philadelphia Phillies went on a long strange trip that was marred by a slew of injuries.  Of course, GM Ruben Amaro, skipper Charlie Manuel, and the rest of the team kept on Truckin', and they somehow enter this week's playoffs with the best record in baseball.

The 2010 Atlanta Braves ended their season with a line-up that had seven different starters from the one that ended the 2009 season.

Brain McCann was the only stable.

Through off-season trades, signings and in-season trades, Braves General Manager Frank Wren, significantly redesigned the team's roster.

I have nothing against the San Francisco Giants—in fact, I don’t particularly care about them one way or the other. I’m sure they’re nice people, and they’re certainly a very good baseball team.

But, while San Francisco’s successes and failures don’t rouse my passions as an Indians and Red Sox fan, their victory Sunday afternoon irked me as a baseball fan because of the domino effect it had on the playoff scene.

It has been five years since the Atlanta Braves took a champagne shower in celebration of making it to postseason play. With an 8-7 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies and a little help from the San Francisco Giants, the Braves wrapped up the wild card on Sunday.

Nine hitting clones of Jose Bautista (including the DH). Some 486 home runs between them. Over 1,000 "runs" (taking the average of runs and RBI to adjust for batting order). And 900 bases on balls. All with a batting average of "only" .260.

This isn't going to happen. Even Bautista himself might find it hard to hit another 50-plus home runs next season after pitchers adjust to him.

Now that the 2010 MLB regular season has been completed and the divisional playoff pairings have been decided, all of the baseball prognosticators will be out in force, attempting to give their predictions on which team will likely emerge as World Champions.

These same scribes, statisticians, former players and sabremetricians will no doubt distribute mountains of data and spew out fact-based analysis to support their arguments.

They will also undoubtedly base their findings on their own spectacular histories in correctly predicting previous winners.

On first glance, it might be tempting to view the Twins' first-round playoff draw as a bad omen.

The New York Yankees swept Ron Gardenhire's crew last October en route to a World Series title, and they will come back for a rematch beginning Wednesday. The Yankee mystique, restored in full last fall and very much in play even now, will pose a challenge to the Twins from the first pitch onward.

The San Francisco Giants are going to the playoffs for the first time since the ill-fated 2003 campaign.

Officially.

And the tortuous 2010 regular season really couldn't have ended any other way.

When the Giants swept the Arizona Diamondbacks earlier this week, the clincher seemed like a formality.