Playoff Predictions Contest Recap

Before the playoffs started, I ran a predictions contest.  The winner receives his or her choice of a sports keychain from wholesalekeychain.com.  These are nice, I have a couple and really like them.  Below are all the entries, showing the winning (green) and losing (red) picks and scores tabulated.

Click to enlarge

Congratulations to Pat S. for winning. He not only had the most total points, but was the only entrant to correctly pick the Giants as the World Series champion.  A few interesting observations on the entries:


- Nobody picked the Yankees to even make it to the World Series. As my son pointed out, I guess I shouldn't be surprised because, after all, this is a Red Sox blog.
- Three out of the seven contestants had the Tigers winning it all. This is despite the fact that there was a lot of noise within the baseball community that the only reason they were even in the playoffs is that they played in a weak division.  Only having the 7th best record in the American League (below Tampa and the Angels who did not play in the postseason) made them an undeserving team, they said.
- "Birdlover" was the only one to correctly pick both wildcard winners (Orioles and Cardinals... is that where his name came from?), but also picked both those teams to make it to the Fall Classic, and ended up in 2nd last place.
- Which brings me to our last place entry - ME! I wasn't going to take the prize even if I won, but I really didn't expect to get EVERY SINGLE PLAYOFF SERIES WRONG and end up with ZERO points.  What are the odds of that?  Well, the truth is that I HAD PICKED the Tigers and the Giants to play in the World Series. And I put that pick in writing back in April.   But as the playoffs started, I got cute and tried to use a "who has the best former Red Sox players and/or who has the best ties to Canada" approach and that led me to pick the Canadian Joey Votto led Reds to defeat the former Red Sox laden A's in this year's Classic. I can't be right all the time.

Also, congratulations to Dan M aka Left Field for being the random draw prize winner.
I will be contacting Dan and Pat shortly to make arrangements for them to receive their prizes.