Over at the Rabbit Room blog, pastor Russ Ramsey shares the ways he finds baseball is “loaded with significance and parallels to a meaningful life.” The whole thing is a good read, particularly this paragraph near the end:

I believe life is good.  But the goodness isn’t found in home runs alone.  It’s found over the span of a long season, one that is filled with more failure than success, more routine than exhiliration, more anonymity than recognition.  Sometimes we hit it out of the park, sometimes we strike out looking.  Sometimes we make that impossible diving catch, other times we miss the routine grounder hit right to us.  And as it goes for us, so it goes for everyone else.

You can read the whole thing here.

As for my prediction for the ALCS, I see the Red Sox/Rays series going to seven games, and I think the Red Sox are going to pull it out in that seventh game with Jon Lester on the mound. This Red Sox team is nowhere near as good as the 04 team, and maybe not as good as the 07 team either now that Darth Manny is playing for Emperor Torre. But as they showed in the Anaheim series, they can win when their best two hitters are cold (Ortiz and Pedroia) and their bullpen is good enough to hold leads and keep the score close. Then again, I’ve been waiting for the Rays to fall all summer and it never happened, so maybe I’m just underestimating them again.

Over in the NLCS it feels like the Dodgers have all the momentum heading into tonight’s Game 1 in Philly. Yes, the Phillies did handle the Brewers with relative ease, but they didn’t sweep the vaunted Cubbies, now did they? If L.A. can keep that momentum and steal game 1, I think they could win this series in 5 games. But am I predicting that? No. This Phillies lineup seems too good to be held down for a 7-game series. And don’t sleep on the fact that the Dodgers are starting right-handers in the first 3 games of this series, which has lefties Ryan Howard and Chase Utley licking their pine-tar covered lips. I think the Phillies win in 6.

Yes, I am predicting a Red Sox – Phillies World Series, and yes, that is also the matchup that I’m rooting for as a Red Sox fan who lives in Pennsylvania. What about you? Get your predictions down in writing in the comments section before the first pitch is thrown tonight.