Rankings/List

The Philadelphia Philles were the proud owners of the NL's best record during the regular season, and hold home field advantage against the Cincinnati Reds in their Division Series playoff matchup, beginning Wednesday.

So why should anyone believe that the Reds, and their recently extended manager Dusty Baker, can topple the heavily phavorited Phils?

Oh, let me count the ways.

Each October, eight teams compete to prove who is the best baseball team in North America.

This year, the New York Yankees, Tampa Bay Rays, Texas Rangers, Minnesota Twins, Philadelphia Phillies, Cincinnati Reds, San Francisco Giants, and the Atlanta Braves will try to prove their mettle in the postseason.

It's not necessarily the best regular season team that will win: whichever team is best built for the playoffs will come out victorious.

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WhatIfSports.com utilizes its award-winning baseball simulation engine to present the most comprehensive and unbiased ranking possible of all 30 teams in baseball each Monday during the regular season. To come up with the rankings, using only their statistical performance to date this season, each team is simulated against every other team 100 times (50 at home and 50 away) so that all five pitchers in the current rotation start 10 times at each location.

While some players fail to live up to their draft day hype, others completely outperform where they were selected. In some cases, the best options are never selected at all.

Each year we seem to have a player come out of nowhere to produce better than average numbers. How fantasy owners treat them next year is always the ultimate question in cases such as these.

Oftentimes, these players become overdrafted very quickly. Others will have owners waiting to see if they can do it again.

Now that the 2010 MLB regular season has been completed and the divisional playoff pairings have been decided, all of the baseball prognosticators will be out in force, attempting to give their predictions on which team will likely emerge as World Champions.

These same scribes, statisticians, former players and sabremetricians will no doubt distribute mountains of data and spew out fact-based analysis to support their arguments.

They will also undoubtedly base their findings on their own spectacular histories in correctly predicting previous winners.

The 2010 MLB postseason has finally arrived.

After 162 games of scratching and clawing through the league, only eight teams remain. Each club has gotten here because of the supreme talent on its team.

Each team remaining has at least two players that are in the top tier of the league. Expect these 25 players to have the biggest impact in October. Whether it be a key home-run or a huge strikeout, elite players have the potential to etch their name in the history books.

The eight playoff teams have been decided. Due the the nature of the short series, each team has a legitimate shot at winning championship.

However, there were 22 teams that proved incapable of making the postseason.

Most of those squads were not expected to battle for a postseason berth. But a few teams were supposed to be contenders yet disappointed the prognosticators and their fans.

So which teams were 2010's biggest underachievers?

A 162-game season came down to the last game.

The Phillies and Reds clinched their divisions early on, but the NL West and Wild Card spots came down to the wire. In the regular season's final game, the Braves, Padres, and Giants fought it out on the field and engaged in intense scoreboard watching off it.

But the hypothetical three-way tie didn't materialize as the Braves managed to squeeze by the Phillies in an 8-7 victory, and the Giants took care of business in San Francisco shutting out the Padres, 3-0.

October is upon us once again.  It is one thing that is almost as certain as death and taxes, yet at the same time, can never be scripted as FOX claims.  The plot is about ready to thicken as September ends and October commences.

There is something about the aura of October that always keeps us guessing, its essence is so subtle and can never be fully explained.  The things that have happened in past Octobers  are still mysteries that will remain unsolved. 

With the San Francisco Giants taking care of the San Diego Padres Sunday afternoon, there won't be a Game 163 this season. And more importantly, we now know who will partake in this year's playoffs. 

In the American League, things were less exciting on the last day of the season as there were no playoff berths up for grabs.

Will the Yankees repeat? Can Bobby Cox's Atlanta Braves send their manager out on a high note?