Night Owl Cards

    The 2021 postseason is weird already. I never expected to see Juan Soto sitting in the stands rooting for my team last night. But that's a good sign, right? I'm seeing them everywhere. Not only did the Dodgers advance in classic last-minute, late-night style, but two distasteful teams, the Yankees and Cardinals, have been banished within the first two days. Hallelujah! I don't have to view Brett Gardner or Yadier Molina for any more games!   Still, there's plenty of ugly out there. It is the playoffs after all.   So this is where I sort it all out, reviewing each potential World Series matchup -- there are 16 of them -- to see which team I want to win from each. I'm sure you know how this goes, I've done it for a bunch of years already (in what seems to be a recent fall 2021 trend, this post will be massively ignored even though previous versions were abundantly viewed. It's like blogging in the forest lately. Am I making a sound?)   This is my blog vers...

    To demonstrate exactly how "2020" this postseason could turn, the Astros could conceivably knock off, in order, the three teams with the most justifiable gripes against them -- the A's, Yankees and Dodgers -- en route to a World Series title that nobody wants to see. If this happens, it's quite possible I will turn off all electronic devices for a month straight as I have as much desire to watch the Reddicks, Josh and Jett (if that is your real name), celebrate and babble nonsense as I do monitoring the Election Day hooey that will follow shortly afterward. Not a lot good can come out of this postseason. That's OK, because I'm not putting much stock in the champion of a 60-game season. (Sure, if the Dodgers win I'll parade that title down the middle of the freeway).   In that frame of mind, I've adjusted somewhat my annual look at the 16 potential World Series matchups. After 10 years of doing this, I've scrapped the nifty titles that were supp...

All right, wild-card games out of the way, ridiculous over-the-top celebrations for play-in games out of the way, we've arrived at the real part of the postseason. Has anyone been dreading this as much as I have? I like to think of watching baseball games as a fun activity. But the older I get, the more consecutive times the Dodgers make the postseason, the more Major League Baseball resembles a video game, the more I approach the playoffs just a tad anxious. I'm sorry. That's not the right outlook. But already I don't like the idea of my team's pitcher giving up five home runs in a game, even if the Dodgers still end up winning. I don't know how much of that I can take. And I expect it to happen a lot this October. But the Dodgers are in the playoffs for the seventh consecutive year and I guess I just have to deal. Better than being a Padres fan, right? The first two years I wrote this post, the Dodgers weren't involved. But since then, L.A. an...