Bienvenidos a beisbol y bananas!

I am of the opinion that March and April are far too early to be making predictions about who's going to do what in the 2008 baseball season, but you don't see that stopping the so-called "experts" at ESPN.com and the Ann Arbor News now, do you? All right, in fairness, I wasn't able to find any predictions on the Ann Arbor News website about who was going to do what. Still, I'm willing to bet that some rube from Dexter, Michigan is probably sitting in a back room there, chomping on a cigar and laying 8-to-1 that the Tigers take it all this year. That's MY prediction.

Anyway, seeing how a few teams are already as many as three (3) games into the season, I figure now is as good a time as any for me to weigh in with MY predictions for the '08 beisbol season. AND, because I was clever enough to wait, I actually have some statistics with which to forecast what could be coming next.

First off, I'm going to go loco, which is Spanish for "I'm going to go local." (The differences between our two languages aren't very nuanced, are they?) Let's-a break-a dees down, shall we?

THE NEW YORK METS
Coming off a collapse spectacular enough to rival Titanic vs. the Iceberg, the Mets decided to reinforce the scrapes in their hull with Johan Santana, whose name, not coincidentally, rhymes with banana. But will the Mets slip on a Santana peel in '08 they way they did all the way back in September '07?

If their first two games are any indication, the answer to that question is yes. So far, the Mets have ONLY managed to win games pitched by Johan Banana, setting the stage for an abysmal 35-win campaign in 2008. THE NUMBERS DON'T LIE, FOLKS. Also, approximately half of the Mets' games have gone to extra innings, so this is a team that is going to be dealing with fatigue down the stretch. More worrisome still, the Mets have managed just ONE WIN on the road so far in '08. If that trend continues (and they wouldn't call it a trend if it didn't), um... well, I think we can all agree that would not be good news for Mets fans.

THE NEW YORK YANKEES
Two boroughs away, however, the Yankees are already looking unstoppable. They have yet to lose this year, and Chien-Ming Wang's ERA of 2.57 would have put him 2nd in the majors last year, and nearly half a run ahead of anyone else in the American League! Even Johan Banana!

Quick side note here while I'm talking about the Yankees: I am eating a ham-and-provolone sandwich with dijon mustard, and the guy in the cafeteria who made it totally killed it with the mustard. I am sweating and coughing and crying all at the same time. And my nose is running like Johnny Damon legging out that triple in the 8th inning yesterday. Sorry for the mundane details, but you're welcome for not bloggerizing about that shit all the time, like SOME PEOPLE.

THE BOSTON RED SOX
How will the Red Sox fare in the wake of their second championship in four years, and the long shadow of Tacoby Ellsbury stealing the "base heard round the world" in Game 1? Not too well by the looks of things. The Sox are on pace to score a mere 486 runs this year, down a whopping 44% from their output last year. More troubling still are their runs allowed, which project out to a total of 594 - a very respectable number by itself. But their Pythagorean win percentage (Runs Scored [squared]/Runs Scored [squared] + Runs Allowed [squared]) is a mere .400, meaning that we can expect the Sox to finish the year with a paltry 65 wins at this rate.

Skeptics might point to their .667 winning percentage now, but as I said before, THE NUMBERS DO NOT LIE. Numbers can't lie. They're numbers. The best they can hope for is to stand up and not get knocked over by the spray from the garden hose. But since the .667 percentage is also a number, I guess there's some basis for expecting that the Red Sox could finish the year with a 108-54 record.

Not that it will matter much. Because if current trends continue (and they wouldn't call them trends if they didn't), a 108-54 record will put them 54 games behind the Yankees. I'd say that paints a pretty grim forecast for the Red Sox's chances of defending their title.

Wait, Sox's? Is that right? What's the possessive of Sox? Come to think of it, how can a Sox possess anything in the first place?

Wow, this prognostication thing is much harder than I thought! All right, this last one is for all those nincompoops at the Ann Arbor News:

THE DETROIT TIGERS
are a bunch of gay Jews. And you know what they say about gay Jews. It's like that very famous poem from the 19th century:

Meat and dairy for dinner
Makes you a winner,
But gay Jews
Will always lose.

Truer words were never spoken. Enjoy another thousand years without a World Series trophy, Detroit and its suburbs!