Opinion

The MLB offseason is here for the majority of teams around the league, and all of those squads are looking to see how to improve toward next season.

Although there aren't many impact free agents available in the 2017 class, a team can add a game-changing talent if it is willing to pay the price.

Here are some of the latest rumors surrounding the top players on the market.

CHICAGO — To understand the psyche of Chicago Cubs fans is not to be a team historian.

Steve Bartman and the Curse of the Billy Goat are integral events in the long-suffering organization's history. As are countless postseason disappointments.

If the Chicago Cubs have their way, 2016 will be the year they finally end a 108-year World Series championship drought and send the Curse of the Billy Goat the way of the Curse of the Bambino.

Clayton Kershaw, David Price and Jon Lester are scheduled to headline a star-studded day of pitching Friday as the two American League Division Series roll on and both National League Division Series get underway after an entertaining first few days of playoff action.

Before the postseason even began, injuries decimated the Cleveland Indians' starting rotation.

In Game 1 of the American League Division Series on Thursday night at Progressive Field, the Tribe's bats and bullpen made sure that didn't matter.

Trevor Bauer, Cleveland's starter by default as much as merit, lasted just 4.2 innings, yielding three runs on six hits to a potent Boston Red Sox lineup. 

From the way it was being billed, the American League Division Series showdown between the Toronto Blue Jays and Texas Rangers sounded less like a baseball affair and more like a prizefight.

If that's how it is, I'm compelled to say the Blue Jays have scored a first-round knockdown.

This prediction thing isn't so hard, folks. After all, I got the Wild Card Games right, so how hard could it be predicting the rest of the postseason?

OK, OK, it's incredibly hard. I've surely jinxed myself now. But hey, that won't stop me from putting my picks out there. So below, we'll break down the postseason schedule, and I'll make my predictions all the way up to the World Series.

It's October! Let's all go down to the pumpkin patch and see which appears first, the Great Pumpkin or Zach Britton...

1. Standing in the Shadows of October

They've won Cy Young awards. They're earning hundreds of millions of dollars.

But will Boston's David Price and Los Angeles' Clayton Kershaw dominate in one of these postseasons the way they've dominated in the regular season?

On Thursday night at Progressive Field, the Boston Red Sox and Cleveland Indians will meet for the sixth time in postseason play.

Each team has won two series, with Cleveland also taking a one-game tiebreaker playoff in 1948.

That's interesting for historical context, but it doesn't have any bearing on the 2016 American League Division Series.

At one point, this would have been a clash between the Indians' stable of power arms and Boston's deep, potent lineup.

If the remaining MLB playoff teams were a Quentin Tarantino flick, they might be called The Grateful Eight.

OK, that's unfair. "Grateful" implies an element of luck. And while there's some good fortune in every postseason run, all of these clubs deserve to be where they are.

They earned it over a 162-game slog and, in the case of the Toronto Blue Jays and San Francisco Giants, the high-pressure crucible of the one-and-done Wild Card Game.