The ALCS will begin tomorrow, and the Yankees will take it.  Now, don’t get us wrong: we’re rooting for a freeway series–great for the city of L.A. and good for baseball.

The Angels have a lot of momentum: they have never before swept a postseason series, and to do so against the Red Sox, their postseason nemesis in recent years, probably means a lot to the clubhouse.  Their pitching has improved hugely from last year (when they got swept by the Red Sox in the ALDS), and they added the Rays’ Scott Kazmir for the stretch run.  Their starting pitching in the Division Series was nothing short of great.

But….they never added a bat.  Remember a couple years ago, when people started feeling that Vlad Guerrero, their big bat, was mostly done and/or couldn’t walk anymore.  This is still so true that, with two outs in the ninth, Terry Francona opted to walk someone else to get to Guerrero.  Admittedly, he got a hit, but it was his first off of Papelbon, and his first clutch hit in…long. Real long.

The Angels added Torii Hunter in the 2007 offseason.  Even their management knew that wasn’t enough, though–thus the addition of Mark Teixeira for their playoff run, which didn’t turn out to help.  This year, no new bat.

Meanwhile, the Yankees have always had bats.  Too many bats.  (DH options at the beginning of the 2008 offseason?  Johnny Damon.  Hideki Matsui.  Bobby Abreu.  Jorge Posada.  Among others.) What they didn’t have was team chemistry, and Joe Girardi feels that his club has loosened up and is having more fun playing the game.  This is due, in our opinion, to the addition of Nick Swisher, who clearly has a ton of fun playing the game.  Nobody smiled bigger than Swisher last week when the stadium crowd laughed as he forgot how to count to four and tried to take a walk on a 2-2 pitch.  (If it had been A-Rod, he’d probably have burst into tears.)

The Yankees have a veteran playoff pitcher in Pettite, their bullpen is solid with the settling of Phil Hughes into the eighth inning setup role.  Every time you think Mariano Rivera is out, he pulls you back in, Corleone style.  Their bats are huge, and their clubhouse is finally getting rowdy.

We think that Angels have their work cut out for them, and we wish for their sake they hadn’t swept the Sox.  (No, really. A longer break means less momentum headed into the ALCS, which begins Friday.)  But we’ll go ahead and say they’ll take a game:

Yankees in 6.

OK, dying industry.  Only Topps remains of the licensed manufacturers, so maybe we’re hopping on this boat kind of late.

But we always wanted to collect baseball cards, and we were inspired by running into a kid the other day who seems to have a college fund in a binder.  Joe Girardi rookie card! Curt Schilling rookie card!  Jerry Remy before he was a broadcaster!

And we started thinking.  The fun of baseball cards, indubitably, is the grab bag aspect: not knowing what you’re going to get, and knowing it could be anything.  And for a rookie collector, the process is probably easier than ever, with the myriad opportunities to acquire old cards on Ebay and similar internet-y haunts.

We went to a game the other day and bought a couple grabbag boxes…and ended up with a 1994 Trot Nixon card (it’s even all foil-y and shiny!) and a Josh Hamilton rookie card.

That’s pretty cool. Not to mention the new found ability to organize things obsessively and also to interest future small children in baseball.  (And these are DEFINITELY a few of our favorite things.)

Anyone have any good baseball card stories? Or, better yet, baseball cards?