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Playoff team hater rankings

For those of us who are glass-half-empty about an A's-less postseason.

Tom Szczerbowski/Getty Images

I actually was prepared to enjoy this postseason, whoever won. I had mentioned that there weren't actually any teams that I hate here. Alex Hall has made a series of sunny posts giving many good reasons to root for the various teams involved. Then I got to thinking about Cespedes and Donaldson and all the opportunities the A's frittered away and the fact that suddenly there's a bunch of crappy teams that are good and we might never be good again and...well, I guess it's just hard for me to support any team besides my own. I found some good reasons to hate all the teams, but I think we all know which one we are rooting against. In most palatable to least palatable, here are your 2015 playoff teams....

Cubs: I don't like these guys. They just got Theo Epstein and Joe Maddon and all of a sudden they're contending for a title and they look like the smartest team on the planet. It's just completely unfair when things work out like they are supposed to. Us A's fans are used to things burning to the ground in an excruciatingly unexpected fashion. Why should they get to have a talented young core come up, win a wild card game and go to the NLCS? This team never makes the playoffs, hasn't sniffed a world series in around a billion years and all of a sudden everything is coming up roses. Not only that but they have a core of young players that look like they may end up dominating for the next five years or so. Cubs fans are already annoying enough when they try to pretend that their team is relevant. Do we really want to see their constant blabbing fueled by title runs? The only saving grace is as an American League team, we can generally avoid them.

Mets: Not exactly the easiest team to hate. But after bilking NY taxpayers for Citi Field (a field named after a bank that also enjoyed a healthy dose of government bailout dough) incompetent owner Fred Wilpon gave all his money to Bernie Madoff in an "if it seems to good to be true, it's because it is" scheme. So these guys frittered away many years in the nation's biggest market turning out terrible teams and really not even trying to win at all. Of course, the Mets have Cespedes, but if Cespedes the rental player can take this team to the promised land when Cespedes my most favorite player in the world couldn't do the same for the A's...some part of me will be bitter. A Mets victory is bittersweet at best. At worst, it's rewarding irresponsible billionaires who have already been rewarded for their massive incompetence.

Blue Jays: They swindled us out of Josh Donaldson and they're riding him to the title. Although I wish no harm on JD it sucks that they are basically in this position because we gave it to them. Oh yeah, also deadline deals for two future hall of fame players, David Price and Troy Tulowitzki. Everyone is just handing them stuff! They don't deserve it! Also turf really sucks for baseball...watching this many games on turf is just really freaking annoying. Their roaring back to take three straight against the rangers brought back shudders...because the A's somehow find a way to be on the other side of that. Every freaking time.

Royals: I went to the A's-Royals series at the Coliseum this year. I can say without a doubt that the Royals fans were the worst, most arrogant pricks of all the visiting fan bases. Give me a game with Angels fans, Yankees fans (even on a never-ending Jeter retirement tour) and even Red Sox fans versus whatever these guys have become. For approximately three decades we have watched the Royals lose. They garnered universal sympathy from baseball fans. When they made the playoffs pretty much everyone was rooting for them. Even many of us A's fans were cheering them on after we (kind of sort of) got over the wild card loss. Little did we know what kind of monster we had created, drunken obnoxious "Straight Outta Kauffman" wearing jerks who think their team is God's gift to baseball. And that's not even the worst of it. This particular team engaged in nonsensical fights all season long against the A's and every other team. They are unapologetic about throwing at people and acting like whiny children. Ned Yost has somehow parlayed an above-average booger picking skill into consecutive ALCS runs.

Please, please just get rid of KC Royals, and then I'll take whatever consequences that come out of this year's postseason.