I wrote the piece on Sunday, and it appeared here on Monday, just 48 hours ago.
At the time, I mentioned how half of the 22 writers who ventured postseason predictions on this website had already been proven wrong. Writing about baseball doesn’t mean we have any sort of crystal ball, apparently.
On Tuesday, the second week of the baseball postseason began in grand style. The prospect of a decisive game five in either series in the National League was removed when the Cardinals and Giants each closed out their higher-seeded opponents at home. And once that happened, the remaining prospects for a TTFB-selected World Series champion fell from eleven all the way down to one.
There are just four teams left in the postseason this year, and three of them were given no chance at all by the writers for this website. Five writers had the Nationals winning everything, and five more picked the Dodgers to go all the way. Nobody had the Cardinals or the Giants winning out, so of course they moved on to the next round of the playoffs.
So hats off to you, Joseph Lawsky. You’re the only one of us who still has a chance of saying that he picked the winner. The rest of us will have to take comfort in the fact that we collectively couldn’t see this year’s results coming. No one picked the Giants to still be playing at this point, and only four writers — myself included — chose the Cardinals to make it this far.
The American League was a bit more foreseen in these parts, as nine writers chose the Orioles to make it this far, and three had the Royals still alive at this point.
Of baseball’s final-four teams, half of the 22 TTFB writers making predictions failed to predict a single one. Six more chose one out of four, and five others correctly chose two of the final four. Nobody was able to pick so many as three of the final four teams playing baseball this postseason. Are we that clueless, or is the game that unpredictable? I hope its the latter.
I was one of the five writers who managed to get the final pairings half right. Along with Jessica Lyons, Mike Lovett and Matt Commins, I chose the Orioles and the Cardinals to make it this far in the postseason. The other half-right prognosticator is Brandon C. Williams, who had the Orioles and the Royals playing for the American League crown.
Baseball is a crazy and unpredictable game, as the past eight days of playoff action has made abundantly clear. Is it too late to start over again for the final two rounds? Just an idea, but one that might work. We could hardly do any worse than we’ve already done.