Scocca

Happy October! And how is your favorite baseball team doing? Mine had a little hot streak that was just enough to keep it from being the worst team in the league. Then, in the final days of the season, the injury-plagued leadoff man wrapped things up by clubbing himself in the head with his bat . "It's a lesson to myself, a lesson to the kids to not do that," he said, after missing the final six games with headaches.

So now it's time for the annual task of figuring out who to root for in the playoffs. A Rays-Reds World Series would probably be what baseball deserves: two teams whose own fans won't even turn out to see them . Or it would be fun if the team that went bankrupt made it. Or the team whose best player got dumped by two different last-place teams because he was so bad. Better just make a chart.