By BARRY LEWIS Sports Writer on Oct 5, 2012, at 1:55 PM Updated on 10/06 at 1:10 AM
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After batting .500 during the regular season on picking division champions, it’s time to predict the major league playoffs that start Friday with the wild-card games.
But first a thought on the expanded playoffs. I like adding a fifth playoff team in each league only because it makes it more difficult for a wild-card team to reach the World Series and makes winning the division title much more valuable than being a wild card for the first time since the wild card was introduced in 1995. My only criticism is that the wild-card round is only one game instead of a best-of-3.
Critics of a best-of-3 say that would leave the division champions idle for too long, but they would be inactive for less time than pennant winners often are between the league championship series or World Series. The time between the regular season and division series would be similar to the All-Star break.
With playoff rosters able to be changed after each round, the wild-card games will likely have teams putting together 25-man rosters similar to the old days when teams had 16 position players and only nine pitchers, instead of the 13-12 split most currently use.
In the National League's wild-card round, I am picking Atlanta over defending World Series champion St. Louis. It’s ironic these teams are meeting in this one-game playoff round because this would have been an unofficial playoff matchup last year if Atlants could have won the final day of the regular season to tie St. Louis for the lone wild card in 2011.
Atlanta has won 23 consecutive starts by pitcher Kris Medlen and that’s impossible to ignore. Kyle Lohse (16-3) deserves to be St. Louis’ starting pitcher because of the season he had, but doesn’t have the playoff credentials of two other St. Louis starters, Adam Wainwright and Chris Carpenter. Lohse made three postseason starts last year, and began each of them well before falling apart in the middle innings.
In last year’s postseason, St. Louis lost openers on the road at Philadelphia and Milwaukee, but had time to recover. They won’t have that kind of time this year.
St. Louis will try to spoil the end of Chipper Jones’ career in a similar way as Atlanta did to the Cardinals’ Ozzie Smith in the 1996 NLCS.
Look for the Atlanta-St. Louis winner to beat Washington in the division series.
In the AL wild-card game, Baltimore and Texas are fortunate to be playing each other because both teams ended the regular season on a major emotional downer, particularly Texas, which saw a five-game lead over Oakland slip away in the last nine days. Look for Texas, with Yu Darvish on the mound and having the advantage of playoff experience and the home ballpark, to bounce back against the Orioles, making their first playoff appearance since 1997.
So, let’s look at how the rest of the playoffs will go:
National League Division Series: Atlanta over Washington; Cincinnati over San Francisco.
National League Championship Series: Cincinnati over Atlanta.
American League Division Series: Texas over New York; Detroit over Oakland.
American League Championship Series: Detroit over Texas.
World Series: Detroit over Cincinnati.
This year’s division series format could hurt the teams with the best records because the teams without `home-field advantage’ actually will have the advantage of playing the first two games at home.
Back in April, I picked Detroit as the World Series winner and I am sticking with the Tigers. They seem to fit the profile of recent World Series champions, at 88-74 they didn’t have an overwhelming record but they got hot at the right time to scramble into the playoffs. Teams with the best regular-season record rarely win the World Series anymore.
-- Barry Lewis
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