My Belated 2015 Baseball Playoff Picks

I should have written this yesterday, before the American League wild card playoff game between the New York Yankees and the Houston Astros...won by the latter 3-0 at Yankee Stadium.  That result affects how I look on the upcoming games, since my preference among all five AL playoff teams was in the following order:

1-Yankees, 2-Toronto, 3-Houston, 4-Kansas City, 5-Texas

Now I'm rooting for Toronto to handle Texas in their upcoming series while hoping that the Astros can capitalize on Kansas City's late-season slide and upset them in their series.

In the National League, my preferences are in the following order:

1-New York Mets, 2-Chicago Cubs, 3-Pittsburgh, 4-Los Angeles Dodgers, 5-St. Louis

The Cubs play their single wild card game against the Pirates tonight. Whoever wins this contest will face St. Louis in the next round, while the Mets are already slated to go up against the Dodgers. I think that this one-and-done wild card game format is asisine...especially considering the 162 regular season games played by each team to reach this point...not to mention that the true measure of a team is expressed over its starting pitching rotation in a multiple-game series.  That rotation is meaningless in a one-game playoff.  Also, I don't think that since both Pittsburgh and Chicago had better regular season records than the division-winning Mets and Dodgers, they should have to play against the Cardinals, who had baseball's best regular season record.  Instead, once the wild card round is completed, the four teams left in each league should be seeded according to their regular season win-loss records...

As for the World Series, since the Yankees are out of the picture, I'm going for Toronto to win it all.  Now all of this, understand, is based on which teams I want to succeed...not which ones I think are most likely to succeed.  If I went by who I thought was most likely to get to the World Series, I would still pick Toronto in the American League and the Cubs-Pirates winner on the National Side...with the Blue Jays winning the series...