MLB Preview: Better late than ... whatever, here it is.

Back from hiatus and a journey to attempt to understand this...
waking...
life

So here's an abbreviated preview of this major league baseball season to convince you I haven't died.

AL East: Boston
Reason: The Sports Guy putting together a roll of quarters over Daisuke Matsuzaka ... I would rather eat a dingleberry salad than select the Yankees to win anything ... Royce Clayton is prominently involved in Toronto's season ... Nothing's changed in Baltimore ... Tampa Bay outfielder Elijah Dukes once shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die

Al Central: Minnesota
Reason: Sidney Ponson. ... Grady Sizemore is one of the best outfielders in baseball and ridiculously good-looking (I say this as a heterosexual male), so it's human nature for me to want him to fail ... Detroit continues to close with Todd Jones (fat, throws slow) and set up with Joel Zumaya (throws 101, has flames tattooed on forearm) ... There's this website called Baseball Prospectus that created a statistic called VORP, which is intended to calculate a player's value in comparison to a replacement player (represented by zero the hero). Darin Erstad, Chicago's new center fielder, is projected to have a VORP of -19.6 this year. That's like your employer replacing you with a hamster ... There are a collection of human beings playing for Kansas City, and that's all I can tell you about them

Al West: LA Angels
Reason: The Angels have these guys that are good at throwing the baseball ... Oakland is committing to losing one of their best players every offseason ... Jamey Wright is Texas's fifth starter this season and has been empirically proven by multiple sources to be absolute crap ... The Mariners continue to make themselves irrelevant by spending money on Jose Guillen, Jeff Weaver, Miguel Batista and Horacio Ramirez

ALDS: Angels over Red Sox, Twins over Yankees (Wild Card, only because Bernie Williams has finally passed on)
ALCS: Angels over Twins
Reason: Pitching always wins in the postseason, except when the Cardinals win the World Series, in which case nobody knows why they won.

Coming soon: NL Preview (and maybe new writers)