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.

It might make a big difference, and the difference it makes might be to the players.

We first noticed it while watching the Hall of Fame game–and boy, did we miss football–when the kicker for the Buffalo Bills, Rian Lindell, tried a fieldgoal…relatively routine anyplace but Buffalo, where it is always windy as hell no matter what, that is.  And the TV told me that, in fact, he had a 98% fieldgoal percentage from 40 yards or less.  So for Lindell, that’s less than nothing to hit–even in Buffalo, because he knows he can do it.  The man has the second-highest fieldgoal completion percentage in the NFL.  That makes any kick easier.

Simultaneously, we were watching the Sox and the Yankees on ESPN Sunday night baseball, and thinking about baseball stats.  A lot of the time, pitcher-hitter splits don’t really matter, but when they get to more than ten at-bats between a duo, they begin to do so in two cases.  One is when the batter’s average is over .325 or so versus a pitcher in that many at bats.  The batter starts thinking he has the guy figured out.  For example, Trot Nixon used to have  Roger Clemens figured out.  The solid but non-HOF left fielder for the Sox had a .371 average versus Clemens in THIRTY FIVE at bats.

Another instance is when a pitcher has a batter figured out: when A-Rod walked into Yankee stadium this evening, he was 1-12 in his career versus Jon Lester.  For a sensitive soul like A-Rod–and we say that without irony, because whatever else the man is, he’s clearly pretty worried about expectations, etc. More on this sometime.–that’s a big deal, and you could see it in his first two at-bats: he walked into the box like someone who was already walking out.

A third and final (since we don’t want to talk your ear off) time split-stats matter?  When a pitcher and catcher–like Posada and Pettite–have worked together so often, it’s like they have a mind-meld.   Pettite and Posada have been battery-mates 173 times, counting tonight.   That’s the most of any pitcher and catcher all-time.  At that point, you’ve got a big advantage.

So don’t mock the statheads, OK? Players don’t, and we see a reason.