jason stark picks sox over yanks

from espn.com could there be another alcs head-to-head in store for these two teams?:

Didn't you know it would come down to this? First, we'd like to invite Aaron Boone, Pedro, Don Zimmer, Grady Little, Bucky Dent and Mike Torrez to sit together in our VIP box for the entire series. Now let's try to sort this out.

The Red Sox are far from perfect. We acknowledge that. They're a middle-of-the-order bat short, and they told us that when they threw all those bucks at Mark Teixeira. So they've never needed David Ortiz more than they do this year.

"Big Papi is a big question mark," one scout said. "He's got to have a bigger presence and bigger production to give the rest of that lineup the confidence it can score runs. Mike Lowell has to have a better year. Jason Bay has to hit. J.D. [Drew] has to stay healthy. There are a lot of question marks there."

But now let's go back to those three pivotal questions: Who has more depth (especially pitching depth)? Who has the better bullpen? Which group feels more like a team?

We hate to break it to the Steinbrenner family, but the Yankees aren't the answer to any of those questions.

"That [Yankees] rotation is so good that it's hard to imagine a situation where their starting pitching isn't dominant," one panelist said. "But you can easily envision a situation where their options in the seventh and eighth inning aren't dominant."

"The closer is still great, but beyond that, that bullpen is very unproven," another panelist said. "[Brian] Bruney looked like a shaky guy this spring. [Damaso] Marte -- I'm not sure how much trust to put in a guy like that in a town like New York. And I'm not sure where they turn if those guys can't do it. Compare that to the Red Sox, with all the depth in their bullpen, and it's not even close."

And even in the rotation, said another panelist, the Red Sox have one subtle, but significant, advantage -- their sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth starters.

"I'd take Boston, just because of [John] Smoltz and [Brad] Penny and [Clay] Buchholz as much as anything else," he said. "And because of their pitching depth, they have the ability to go out in the second half and get whatever they need."

The Red Sox pieces also seem to fit together better than the Yankees' pieces. A-Rod's injury has already elevated to Cody Ransom to a role he was never supposed to have to assume. Now what happens if Jorge Posada can't catch regularly? If Posada has to DH, what happens to Hideki Matsui? Will Nick Swisher accept life as a bench player? Where do they turn if Derek Jeter gets hurt? Or Robinson Cano?

This is also a team with second-tier defense at way too many positions on the field. And that's if everybody stays healthy. So the Yankees' worst-case scenarios can get awfully messy.

"To me," said one scout, "the Yankees feel more like a bunch of stars who happen to be playing together than a real baseball team."

"With the Yankees, you always wonder about their chemistry," another panelist said. "If you think that's been one of their problems in the past -- and I do -- you can see where it might not be a good situation this year. And wait 'til A-Rod shows up. At some point, that black cloud is coming back. And how will they handle that?"

When you have pitching, of course, it's amazing what you can handle. But if we stack up one team's negatives alongside the other team's negatives, the Yankees clearly have the bigger pile.

So that leaves the Red Sox. They're the one team we haven't voted off this island. And that means they're our pick. By process of elimination. Literally.

Now feel free to head straight to Vegas and tell them we told you the Boston Red Sox are going to win the 2009 World Series.

Then they'll look over our record of predictions over the years, laugh uproariously for the next 15 minutes and gladly take all your money. But hey, better yours than ours.