Ladies and Gentlemen, and All Ships at Sea. (And hold your breath all fans of Right Off the Bat.) I just sent Tipsy in Toluca Lake  my 2011 predictions. Of course, “predicting” is ridiculous. Some highly touted free agent in the first year of his gigantic contract suffers a concussion. A little-heralded phenom comes out of nowhere to set the baseball world on fire. Another plays for one season like Ty Cobb and disappears. And there is always the star-crossed-star-caught-injecting-applying-or-ingesting-HGH/chemical-enhancements. (“You mean it wasn’t Ovaltine?”)

Anyway (as poor transitionists say: an editor-professor friend of mine enjoys noting this from his study on Moot Point), here goes:

American League

Indians, Red Sox, Athletics, Tigers Wild Card

National League

Brewers, Phillies, Rockies, Marlins Wild Card

(What Baseball Folk Seriously, and Cricket Folk Laughingly, Call) The World Series

Phillies defeat the Red Sox

The Respective Home Fields of these great clubs are in: Cleveland, Boston, Oakland, Detroit; Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Denver, Miami (though let the record show the Rockies are claimed by the entire state of Colorado and the Marlins are known as “the Florida Marlins.” So much for so-called small-market teams that really represent entire states or regions. The only listed place that could be identified as “small market” is Oakland.)

I’ll elaborate on these perhaps-on-the-surface unusual selections in the near-future.