Sorry We're Late...

It's awfully cheap to pick a World Series winner after the games have started, I know.

Thing is, I've been too lazy to update this recently, so you'll just have to trust that I picked my team before the postseason started.

But I don't really care if you believe me, because I don't expect to be right. First, I didn't follow baseball much at all this year, and second, baseball's playoffs are so unpredictable, I'd be lucky to be right even if I did.

Having said all that, I think the Saint Louis Cardinals will be your 2005 World Series Champions!

But I could be happy with a few teams winning, and a lot less happy with others. So instead of making wildly incorrect predictions, here's my picks in order of who I want to win (not who I think will) from most-wanted to least:

1. St. Louis: Because I just picked them and I enjoy being right. (Not to get all cocky here, but Hole Punch Sports has never predicted a champion incorrectly. I have to say that now because it can't last.) Also, the Cardinals have my all-time favorite player in Larry Walker, a rare baseball star who, in his prime, was actually fun to watch. In Colorado, he was a ferocious hitter, Coors Field notwithstanding, but my favorite Walker memories will always be of him gunning down baserunners at third from all the way in the cheap seats.

2. Boston: I've always liked Boston, though I never felt right calling myself a Red Sox fan simply because I never bought in to the whole woe-is-we syndrome. I just liked Nomar and Pedro Martinez. In fact, my favorite time watching the Red Sox was not the World Series, but rather Pedro shrugging off injury and pitching six innings of no-hit relief in the last game of the 1999 ALDS. Easily the most clutch baseball performance I've ever seen.

Man, I'm getting all misty-eyed about the past here. I guess that's how you can tell it's a baseball column.

3. Atlanta: I've got no particular love for the Braves, but my best friend is a Braves fan, so there you go. It is nice to see Andruw Jones, with whom I kind of share a name, hitting up to his ridiculous potential.

Since it was sort of a topic recently with the NCAA thing, I have to say I'm not offended by the name "Braves"-of course, why would I be?-but even this cracker thinks it's insane/hilarious-if-you-get-what-I-mean that in 2005 there's a football team called the "Redskins".

4. Padres: I would be rooting for the Padres like a madman if they had finished the season under .500. There's nothing like a statistical abberation to upset old-school baseball fans, and I would have loved to see that. More to the point, what angle do sportswriters take after a team that barely wins half its games takes the title? You can't write those old-school, heart-of-a-champion stories about a squad that barely qualified for the playoffs, can you? Especially in a sport where the regular season basically used to be the playoffs. That would have been fun.

5. Chicago (AL): Obviously it's not the Cubs in the playoffs, but whatever. I pretty much have no opinion here, but if the city of Chicago never wins another championship, they still got to watch Michael Jordan, so I'll never feel bad for them. (Through the magic of television I, too, watched Michael Jordan, but there's something about having it be your hometown team.)

6. Houston: I don't care much here, either, but Roger Clemens and Andy Pettite really annoy me. Especially Clemens-I get it, he works hard; he's probably the only athlete that does that. I'm sure natural talent has nothing to do with it. (Obviously, he's maximized his talent and that's respectable-but he's not the only pitcher with an exercise routine.)

Pettite I shouldn't mind as much. I hate the Yankees like every decent person, but every playoffs you could count on him to start a key game, then give up eight runs in three-and-two-thirds. So in a way, he was kind of my favorite Yankee.

7. The Los Angeles-Sacramento-San Jose Angels of the Greater Anaheim and San Diego Water Conservation District: The only team in major sports history to win a championship by openly admitting they couldn't compete. Barry Bonds was blasting every pitch in sight in the 2003 playoffs and finally shedding his undeserved reputation as a choke artist. The Angels saw this, took a step back and said, you know what, we can't stop this guy, and, with pitchers acting like pioneer children, walked and walked and walked aaaaaaaaaand walked him.

Yes, it's in the rules, and it obviously helped them win, but let's be practical. When the rule that allowed walks was instituted whenever it was in the 1800s, I'm sure it wasn't to slow down good hitters, but to move the game along and make pitchers throw strikes. I'd rather lose like a man than win by avoiding competition through an outdated loophole.

(And I'm not going to buy the "Who cares, Bonds was cheating" unless you can prove to me that none of the Angels used steroids.)

8. New York (AL): As much as I hate them, at least we can rest assured that having the biggest payroll won't, once again, buy a title. How do I know this? Because I have a friend who's a Yankees fan, and he insists that Shawn Chacon is going to be unstoppable after a solid half of a regular season. Well, I'm from Colorado, chump, and while I certainly wanted and maybe even expected Chacon to turn out, you've got to be kidding me.

See you guys next year!