Coming from Central Pennsylvania, when it comes to rooting for sports, Philadelphia is usually the city to get our attention. So it's no surprise that the baseball team that follows the beat of my heart is the Phillies. I've closely followed them for the past three years, ample time to become familiar with all but the newcomers to the team. While some writers give predictions for the entire MLB, I'm not informed enough to do that. I'll stick to what I know. How my Phillies will do.

Divisional Standing
Florida will come in first place in the NL East. The NL East will also be home to the NL Wild Card, either the Braves or the Phillies. My guess is the Phillies, despite their rocky start to the season. Both the Braves and Phillies will be within just a few games of each other.

Batting Stats
Thome will not only hit the most home runs on the Phillies club, but hit the most home runs in the National League. A notoriously slow starter for all hitting stats, he's managed to keep an average of over .333, despite not appearing on the most home runs list in the early going. He always heats up around and after the all star break, which Cleveland fans can attest to. He'll have no problem playing catch up.

Pat Burrell has shown everyone what an off season of hard work can do and is putting last season's awful season behind him. He, too, is batting over .333 and will hit his share of home runs. Look for him to drastically cut down on his strike outs and rack up the RBIs.

The key for the Phillies offence is for the one and two person in the line up (some combination of Byrd, Polanco, Rollins, and Glanville) to get on base. When they start getting on, they will start getting runs scored.

Pitching
The starting rotation, on paper, should be pretty good. Kevin Millwood, Randy Wolf, Vicentte Padilla, Eric Milton, and Brett Myers are all solid pitchers and would make most team's starting rotations. Collectively, they don't have too many wins so far, however, they have all proved they can pitch. Once they get into a groove, watch out.

The middle relief is the biggest pitching question mark. If all goes to Bowa's plans, the starter will go through seven innings, leaving Bowa's choice of a solid set up man, then leaving the save for the hard throwing, almost automatic Billy Wagner. The bullpen is mostly solid, but will get into trouble the more innings they have to be out there.