King Kaufman's Sports Daily
World Series preview: The Red Sox are better. The Rockies are hotter. Which means more in October? Neither.
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Oct. 24, 2007 | The World Series opens Wednesday night in Fenway Park and on Fox TV with the Boston Red Sox going for their second championship in four years -- also their second in 89 years -- against the Colorado Rockies, who have never been this far in a mere 15 seasons on the planet.
The Rockies are hotter than any team's ever been hot coming into a World Series. They're perfect in seven postseason games, on a 10-game winning streak overall and winners of 21 of their last 22.
But that means nothing.
You're hot until you're not in baseball, and there's no predicting when hot will become not. Every game is a discrete event, with different starting pitchers meaning that today's team might be vastly different from yesterday's.
If momentum meant anything, more teams would go on 21-1 runs more often. Plenty of teams win six or eight or 10 in a row, after all, so momentum ought to keep those streaks going more than once every few decades. The last team to come into the World Series on a run anything like Colorado's was the 1935 Chicago Cubs, who won 21 straight games before losing the last two of the season at St. Louis.
Those games were meaningless, the pennant already having been clinched, but even counting them, the Cubs had won 21 of 23 entering the World Series against the Detroit Tigers. Then they lost Game 1 -- that was the bitter-cold Detroit day that fight manager Joe Jacobs attended his first baseball game and, asked what he thought, uttered the immortal phrase "I shoulda stood in bed" -- and eventually lost the Series in six. So much for momentum.
But here's the thing: Even if there were such a thing as momentum in baseball, even if the Rockies really could count on playing well today just because they played well yesterday, it wouldn't matter because the Rockies didn't play yesterday. Or the day before that. Or the six days before that.
They've been idle for a major-league record eight days. There are pitchers scheduled to start games in this World Series who weren't born when the Rockies eliminated the Arizona Diamondbacks in the National League Championship Series.
The Rockies have been standing still, the very opposite of momentum, while the Red Sox have been reeling off three straight wins over the Cleveland Indians to take the ALCS. Boston isn't Colorado-hot, but the Sox have gone 7-3 in the playoffs, and they only had to sit for two days.
They're also a better team. They're the champions of the stronger league, they have playoff experience and they have the best starting pitcher, the best relief pitcher and the two best hitters in the Series.
So here's the prediction: Rockies in seven.