You Know You're Done When ...

I used to love watching the History Channel because I love learning about history. It, then, became the Nazi Channel, and it’s now the Reality TV Channel. In between those two stages, it went through an Armageddon phase in which it talked about the end of the world, and it focused quite a few shows on Nostradamus. While Nostradamus is an interesting and notable part of history, I always thought the History Channel gave him way more legitimacy than he deserved, and I definitely didn’t need four different shows telling me it may have been his son that did some of his last predictions. Don’t get me wrong. I like predictions, but I don’t like when people make predictions like they know what’s going to happen, which leads us to this post. We’re going to play a little game. I’m going to give you 19 phrases/sentences telling you what teams I think are out of the playoffs, but you'll have to guess which team the phrase/sentence is referring to. At the end, you’ll know my playoff predictions, but understand that I make these predictions knowing they may well be wrong, though they may have an air of certainty behind them. Feel free to argue my predictions, but please understand that I make them for the sake of fun.

You Know You’re Done When …

1) No one can spell your best player’s name, even though he’s one of the best players in his league.

2) You’re a bird. Baseballs destroy birds. (3 teams)

3) You tell your best pitcher to “pitch to contact”, even though he’s good because he strikes out so many hitters, just to fit within an organizational philosophy.

4) You have the worst run-differential in baseball. That’s probably not useful. Just sayin’.

5) You trade away your ace mid-season. Playoff contenders generally don’t do such things.

6) You trade away useful pieces for a maybe-decent player with probably the worst contract in baseball. Karma, man. Karma.

7) You’ve snake-bitten me again and again when I’ve called you a contender only to watch your rattle be worse than your bite.

8) Your GM just does things to do things. (2 teams)

9) You write a book about yourself and then have Brad Pitt direct and act in a movie about the same. What arrogance.

10) You call Jeff Baker an “untouchable”. Unless he’s acting in a movie with Kevin Costner, that phrase indicates that you got a lot of problems.

11) You hope the D-Train pulls you into Playoff Station.

12) You just don’t soar like you’re supposed to. (That will never, ever get old, by the way)

13) You make Eric Wedge shave an epic moustache. Some things just shouldn’t be sacrificed to the baseball gods.

14) You trade Adrian Gonzalez before the season. He’s just so smooth out there, you know.

15) You act like you’re just the sun that warms the earth.

16) Chipper Jones still haunts your dreams.

17) You trust The Process.

18) Bryce Harper is in your organization because he's just a jerk. Karma, man. Karma.

19) You can't stop celebrating LeBron's NBA Championship defeat enough.

(Check back later tomorrow night for the answers)