Forgive us – we can’t get excited about baseball yet. Even though the season begins in a week, the NBA regular season is actually thrilling, and we remain consumed by the NCAA tournament. Still, that doesn’t prevent us from making dimestorm predictions for the upcoming season! We’ll do one of these each day, wrapping up Monday with the NL West, postseason projections, and a small surprise you hopefully will enjoy. The little * denotes a playoff projection. Let us begin with the division that you could have put in order back in December. Seriously – this might be the most predictable division of all the three major sports.

* 1. Boston Red Sox. Even with Schilling out for a couple months (sweet, more blogging!), and Beckett banged up to start this season, this is the deepest rotation in the AL and the Red Sox probably have the best closer in baseball. Barring a slew of significant injuries, we’d be stunned if this team didn’t win 90 games.

* 2. New York Yankees. Sky is blue, water is wet, the Yankees are going to the postseason. Unless, of course, the Indians, White Sox or Mariners beat them to it. Just two questions to ponder, feel free to answer them on our own: Did the Yankees improve their pitching this offseason? What about the hitting? Now, compare that to the White Sox and Mariners.

3. Toronto Blue Jays - They’re not sneaking up on the Big Two. Come to grips with that, and your life will improve. How’s about 81 wins?

4. Tampa Bay Devil Rays – Standard operating procedure – the Rays will titillate with young talent, and tease you with their potential. And then wind up with between 69-74 victories. But until this team actually spends money, it simply isn’t competing. Sorry.

5. Baltimore Orioles – Woe are the O’s, who are likely to finish with a worse record than the Nationals (again), traded away their best pitcher, and still allow a knucklehead like Peter Angelos to run the show.