With the Major League Baseball postseason set to begin Tuesday afternoon, Sport & State’s Jason Foster has published a set of predictions that mix bold calls with a healthy dose of October fatalism. The piece, which appears on The Daily Wire, opens by acknowledging that prognosticating baseball’s playoffs is a “fool’s errand” before diving into ten forecasts for the month ahead and picking a winner in every series.
Foster’s headline prediction is blunt: the Los Angeles Dodgers will not win the World Series. He notes that even the best teams typically have no better than roughly a 23 percent chance of taking the title, citing a recent point made by colleague Matt Foley. That leaves a greater than 75 percent probability that a different team will be the last one standing, and in short-series baseball, Foster writes, anyone can beat anyone.
A Wild Card Round Built for Drama
Foster predicts every Wild Card Series will go the full three games, delivering what he calls some of the most excruciating—and most enjoyable—baseball of the entire postseason. Among those series, he singles out Red Sox vs. Yankees as the one that will finally feel epic again. The rivalry, he argues, has lacked real stakes for the average fan since the 2004 ALCS, but this year’s AL Wild Card meeting will reignite it with back-and-forth, roller-coaster games that could fuel a push to expand the round to best-of-five.
Salary Cap Talk Takes a Hit
Two teams with modest payrolls could complicate the league’s ongoing salary cap debate. The Brewers and Rays each won the most games in their respective leagues despite ranking 19th and 25th in payroll, according to Foster. Their postseason performances, he writes, will make it harder to argue that a salary cap is necessary for small-market clubs to compete—and harder to sell the idea that the Dodgers have ruined baseball with their spending.
Foster’s Cinderella pick for this October is the Guardians, whom he describes as a scrappy 84-win team from a mediocre AL Central. Their underdog run, he predicts, will attract bandwagon fans rooting for a small-market club to upset one of the sport’s big spenders. Meanwhile, he notes that the Astros were the definition of mediocrity this season, winning the AL West with an 81-81 record—the first time an MLB team has won its division without finishing above .500. Even so, Foster expects Houston to advance past the Wild Card round by beating the 84-78 White Sox before falling to Cleveland in the ALDS.
October Belongs to the Unknown
History, Foster writes, shows that postseason heroics are rarely limited to the stars. He predicts that a player who began the season in the minor leagues will deliver a defining moment—whether a clutch hit, a big inning on the mound, or a game-changing defensive play. He also forecasts another three-homer game, a feat that has occurred eight times since 2002, most recently when Shohei Ohtani did it against the Brewers in last season’s NLCS.
On the mound, Foster expects Yoshinobu Yamamoto to throw another complete game for the Dodgers, having done so twice during last year’s championship run—the first complete games in the postseason since Justin Verlander’s in Game 2 of the 2017 ALCS. Foster also predicts a pitcher will flirt with a no-hitter, carrying a bid at least six innings before it’s broken up in the seventh or later. Postseason history includes just three no-hitters: Don Larsen’s perfect game in 1956, Roy Halladay’s in 2010, and a combined Astros no-hitter in 2022.
Finally, Foster calls for the second cycle in postseason history, nearly a decade after Brock Holt produced the only one in Game 3 of the 2018 ALDS. He lists Ronald Acuña Jr., Jarren Duran, Jose Altuve, Mookie Betts, and Ohtani among the many players capable of the feat, writing that the mystery is half the fun.
Foster’s Full Postseason Picks
In the NL Wild Card Series, Foster has the Braves over the Phillies and the Cubs over the Padres. In the AL, he picks the Astros over the White Sox and the Red Sox over the Yankees. His NLDS winners are the Brewers over the Cubs and the Dodgers over the Braves, while the ALDS goes to the Rays over the Red Sox and the Guardians over the Astros. For the pennants, he takes the Brewers over the Dodgers in the NLCS and the Rays over the Guardians in the ALCS—setting up a World Series without Los Angeles, exactly as his boldest prediction foretells.
Foster closes with an invitation for readers to keep score and laugh at him later, a nod to the unpredictable nature of the sport he’s trying to forecast.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/10-bold-predictions-for-the-mlb-postseason-and-predictions-on-every-playoff-series