Baseball in October

October is upon us once again and most everyone in baseball land has gone home for the winter. This includes, of course, the realm of fantasy. With a frantic barrage of homeruns in the final two weeks, my team, The Lefebvre Believers, managed to crawl out of the cellar and finish in 9th place out of 10. We got some good performances this season out of young and cheap players like Gustavo Chacin and Mark Ellis, laying the groundwork for next year's team. My faith in the respective shoulders of Richie Sexson and Eddie Guardado was not misplaced, and Placido Palanco turned out to be a fortuitous mid-season signing. Emily Dickinson said that hope was "the thing with feathers," but I prefer to think that hope is next season. (In the interest of proving myself not a complete fantasy incompetant, I did finish 4th out of 12 in my non-pay league. I guess that's what signing Michael Young, David Ortiz, Joe Mauer and Jason Bay will do for ya).

In the world of actual baseball, a difficult-to-locate prediction continues to haunt me. Google has failed to locate this article, but I distinctly remember Ruben Sierra, at the height of the mid-season Yankee mediocrity, predicting they'd make the playoffs. I remember writing it off at the time as the stiff-upper lip fantasies of a journeyman whose best days most likely involved a needle and Jose Canseco back in Texas. But who's laughing now? That's right, Ruben is. Damn you, game of averages! I think what bugs me about the whole thing is not the collapse of the Red Sox or the lack of parity in the AL East, but that I don't feel like the Yankees have a right to things working out. When Randy Johnson, Jaret Wright, Carl Pavano and Kevin Brown all have old age catch up with them, how is it that the Yankees can procure an Aaron Small or Shawn Chacon to prop up their rotation? How, in a farm system pillaged over the last 10 years, can a better-than-average second baseman like Robinson Cano survive and prosper? It makes me think of the Chuck Klosterman musing about the U.S. government controlling the outcomes of every baseball season. Could it happen here? I'm expecting the White Sox and Cardinals in the World Series, but we'll see.