Ten Solid Predictions for the 2014 Major League Baseball Season

With the start of the MLB regular season coming tomorrow and the scent of peanuts, crackerjacks, and outrageously-priced stale beer invading our nostrils, it is time to turn our attention to America’s favorite pastime. (And no, I don’t acknowledge the two games played between the Dodgers and Diamondbacks in Australia as the start of the regular season. If baseball isn’t played in the good ole US of A it ain’t baseball. That’s right, in my eyes the Toronto Blue Jays only have an 81 game season.) In any event, below are ten ironclad, foolproof, take ‘em to the bank predictions for the 2014 baseball season…

1. After the revelation that Alex Rodriguez was taking illegal gummies, MLB will institute new urine testing procedures that can detect the presence of Twizzlers, Kit Kats, Starburst and Butterfingers, just to be safe.

2. Suddenly realizing there’s still one good player left on his team, Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria trades 2013 Rookie of the Year Jose Fernandez to the Atlanta Braves for a bottle of Jim Beam and three restaurant gift cards to be named later.

3. In an effort to outdo last year’s beard growing antics, Red Sox team members will instead see who can sport the most outrageous facial piercings.

4. A scant 45 minutes after getting hit in the head by a meteorite, Miguel Cabrera still goes three for five with two homeruns and four RBI.

5. In an unprecedented move during a Rangers-Mariners game, umpire Joe West suddenly ejects all of the other umpires because they told a joke during the 7th inning stretch and he didn’t get the punch line.

6. Rookie base-stealing sensation Billy Hamilton gets overzealous after drawing a walk and proceeds to steal second, third, home and the batter’s box while Kyle Lohse is still in the stretch position.

7.  Halfway through the season Cal Ripken makes a surprise comeback and ends up playing more games than Jacoby Ellsbury.

8. During a meaningless September snooze-fest between the Twins and the White Sox, the game is delayed by 23 minutes when the umpires huddle around a monitor to review a contested homerun ball, but instead get caught up in a rerun of “How I Met Your Mother.”

9. After running out of his own teammates and opposing players to antagonize, Yasiel Puig becomes the first player in baseball history to get ejected for getting into a fight with himself.

10. In an unprecedented move after the All-Star break, the Houston Astros decide to swap out their entire major league roster for their entire Triple A roster and end up going on a two game winning streak—their longest of the season.

My Undying Love (And Sometimes Hatred) For Baseball Stats

There is a website called Baseball-Reference.com, which is to baseball statistics what the Sahara Desert is to sand. The information contained on this site is pretty much endless. Want to find out who led the American League in triples in 1958? No problem. Who came in fifth place in the National League Cy Young Award voting in 1993? Easy.  What was Rickey Henderson’s career batting average with one out and runners on first and third? It’s a cinch. (Oh, and for those interested, the answers to those questions are Richie Ashburn, Jose Rijo, and .319, respectively.)

When I first stumbled across this site six or seven years ago, I had to throw my shirt into the dryer about ten minutes later due to the several pints of drool that poured out of my mouth like a mini Niagara Falls. For baseball stat geeks like me, there can be no bigger time suck. In a world without adult responsibilities I can see myself looking at this site for 18 hours at a stretch. (If such a thing existed when I was in high school, I would surely not have a diploma today.)

In general I try to keep this addiction in check. For the most part I don’t look at this website more than once or twice a week, or as current baseball events necessitate. For example, when Torii Hunter hit his 300^th career home run a couple of weeks ago, I felt compelled to race over to Baseball-Reference.com to find out how many current major leaguers have 300 or more homers. (FYI—17.)

But as much as I love combing through the statistical minutiae on this website, there is one factoid kept on this site that as of this year, I no longer enjoy looking at. That would be the yearly list of the oldest player in each league. This year the oldest player in baseball is Mariano Rivera, who will turn 44 on November 29, 2013…a little more than two months after I turn 44. Yup, that means for the first time in my life I’m older than every single player in major league baseball. How’s that for freakin’ sobering?

Yeah, I get it—it’s not that big of a deal. People age. Big whoop. But somehow, even though I never played baseball competitively, have absolutely no athletic ability, and haven’t swung a wooden bat in more than a decade, in the back of my mind I always thought that maybe one day I could be a professional baseball player.

Was I being overly optimistic? Perhaps. Delusional? No question. But now that toxic combination of optimism and delusions has been dashed away forever by raw statistics. I have to face reality—if Mariano Rivera, the oldest player in baseball and two months my junior, is retiring at the end of this season, it’s probably unlikely that my baseball career will ever begin.

And so, nobody will ever find information about me on Baseball-Reference.com; but whatever information they do find on that website, there is an excellent chance that I will have looked at it first.