Normally, it's easy for fans to figure out which team to support each October. Just root for whichever team plays the Yankees.

This year is much tougher because Minnesota and Oakland, baseball's two best stories of the year, play each other in this week's opening round. When two underdogs both beat the odds to reach the postseason on such shoestring budgets, it's impossible to root against either one. But a thorough examination of both teams clearly reveals which one you should root for -- the true small-market underdog: the Twins. Here are 10 reasons why:

	Torii Hunter is cool because no center fielder in the AL makes as many spectacular plays, like this one at the All-Star Game.

1. The Athletics had to overcome losing Jason Giambi to free agency but that's nothing compared to what Minnesota overcame. The Twins had to dig out from under six feet of dirt Bud Selig piled on them. It's one thing to play without an MVP-caliber first baseman. It's another thing to play with a tombstone around your neck.

No team ever faced a worse situation than the Twins did. The commissioner was out to murder them through contraction. Their owner, Carl Pohlad, wanted to take his 30 pieces of silver and run. For months, they couldn't hire a manager to replace Tom Kelly or sell season tickets or count on ever playing another game. The community still refuses to be bullied into building a new stadium.

What was it like? Veteran Denny Hocking put it best during one angry phone call with Selig.

"I said, 'Do you remember that day when you went in front of Congress and the next day everyone was calling for your head? How did you feel? 'He said, 'Denny, to be honest it didn't make me feel very good at all.' 'Well, that feeling you had is the feeling everyone involved with the Minnesota Twins organization felt the entire offseason.'"

The Twins refused to die, though. The stadium commission went to court to force the Twins to play the 2002 season and won, the team dominated the division and eventually Selig backed down by taking contraction off the table until at least 2007 as part of the new basic agreement.

2. Sure, Minnesota opened the season with a payroll that was about $600,000 higher than Oakland's but the Twins are owned by Pohlad, a banker so greedy and soulless he makes Athletics owner Steve Schott seem as free-spending as Ted Kennedy in an election year. How cheap is Pohlad? He got his start in business by delivering disclosure notices to farmers during the Depression and is widely assumed to be the model for the Simpsons' Montgomery Burns. How cheap is Pohlad? The Yankees' $126 million payroll this season is more than Minnesota's payrolls the past five years combined.

How cheap is Pohald? He makes Minnesotans long for the glory days of former owner Calvin Griffith.

3. Oakland plays in the Bay Area, which is the fifth-largest broadcast market in the country. Calling the Athletics a small-market team just because they have a low payroll is like calling Barry Bonds an actor just because he has a SAG card. The Twins are a legit small-market team. Playing in Minnesota, they are at virtual ground zero for small markets, near the center of flyover land and, of course, home to Lake Wobegon, the smallest of small markets.

4. Oakland general manager Billy Beane is a genius at assembling the absolute best team possible on a limited budget but at least he was able to operate freely during the offseason. Twins general manager Terry Ryan couldn't do much last winter other than sell plasma to help meet payroll. Due to contraction, the Twins could barely sign minor-league free agents, let alone major leaguers. It was so bad other teams treated Twins executives as if they had leprosy at the winter meetings.

The only free agent the Twins were able to sign was reliever Mike Jackson, who had so few offers that, he admitted, "I really didn't have a choice."

5. The Twins play in the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, a Teflon-roofed symbol of a more sensible sports era when stadiums were named after people, not dot.com corporations, and when communities built them to host as many sports as possible at the lowest taxpayer expense, not to build the most lavish luxury suites possible for over-compensated CEOs.

The Dome is also site of baseball's best home-field advantage. Rooting for the Twins in October is like being in charge of speakers for a Guns N' Roses concert tour. The Twins have played 12 postseason games in the Metrodome, winning 11. The Blue Jays were the only team to beat them there when Juan Guzman silenced them in Game 2 of the 1991 playoffs.

6. Most of the Athletics have been in the playoffs while outfielder David Justice has played in 107 postseason games and has been with a postseason team 11 consecutive autumns. This is all new to the Twins, though. Other than pitchers Rick Reed and Jackson, the Twins have absolutely no postseason experience. Hocking joked that they won't even know how to get tickets for their family and friends.

7. Sure, Oakland's roster is mostly homegrown, but the Athletics also added such significant players as Jermaine Dye, Ray Durham, Billy Koch and Justice from other teams. Almost the entire Twins roster, meanwhile, spent time riding buses for one of Minnesota's minor-league teams. Hocking calls it a "farm system team" while manager Ron Gardenhire said, "I'm not sure if it's the right way to build a team, because George Steinbrenner's way has been pretty successful, too. But it's the only way we could do it."

8. Oakland isn't even the most popular team in the Bay Area, while the Twins are more than Minnesota's team. They are America's Team, with fans cheering their struggle to stay alive wherever they played this year. In fact, they are the world's team, playing an infield of first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz (Florida), second baseman Luis Rivas (Venezuela), shortstop Cristian Guzman (Dominican Republic) and third baseman Corey Koskie (Canada), which is often referred to as the League of Nations.

9. Oakland has MVP (Miguel Tejada) and Cy Young (Barry Zito) candidates while Minnesota's biggest name is the 12-letter Mientkiewicz. And it could have been worse, as Sports Illustrated's Steve Rushin points out -- his mother's maiden name is Kechiemesiter.

10. But if you want irrefutable proof that the Twins are the true small-market team in this series, consider this: In 1997, Pohlad threatened to sell the team to a patsy named Don Beaver, who said he would move them to the North Carolina Triad of High Point, Greensboro and Winston-Salem. You know you play in a small market when Mayberry is considered a more attractive area.

Whether you root for Minnesota or Oakland, however, the best thing about this series is that one of the two teams will play for the American League pennant. "It has to be one of us," Hocking said. "I hope it's us but if Oakland wins, I'll go right in there and wish them luck and say, 'Go do it for the small markets.'"

Box score line of the week
One obvious reason Arizona fans ought to be concerned is the absence of injured Luis Gonzalez. The other is the recent pitching of Curt Schilling, who is coming off a sub-par final month of the season. Since improving his record to 22-4 with a 2.69 ERA in late August, Schilling is 3-3 with a 5.44 ERA in his last eight appearances, including a rare relief appearance in the last game of the regular season Sunday. His line out of the bullpen:

1 IP, 3 H, 3 R, 3 ER, 0 BB, 1 K

Before we get too worked up, remember that one of Schilling's bad outings was in Colorado, where pitchers go to die, and another was against the Cardinals when he made two bad pitches -- two three-run homers -- but struck out 12. And the relief appearance was an unusual game for him. So, the recent slump could easily be one of those things that quickly becomes forgotten if Schilling pitches to his usual postseason standards. But it's fair to say that if he isn't in top form, Arizona is in trouble.

Lies, damn lies and statistics
How incredible was Ernie Harwell's broadcast career? Not only did it cover 55 seasons, it also included around 8,500 broadcasts, or more games than Brooks Robinson and Carl Yastrzemski played in their careers combined. He had two games streaks longer than Cal Ripken's record. ... The AL West is the first division to have three teams win at least 90 games since the Athletics, Royals and Angels did so in 1989. The AL Central, meanwhile, is the first division to ever have two 100-game losers (Detroit and Kansas City). The last time two 100-loss teams finished next to each other in the standings was 1965 when the Red Sox and Kansas City Athletics each lost 100. ... Due to Torii Hunter's late-season slump, Minnesota finished without a 30-HR hitter for the 15th consecutive season, the longest such streak in the majors. The Blue Jays have had players hit 30 home runs 23 times since Gary Gaetti and Kirby Puckett last did it for the Twins in 1987. ... Boston had two 20-games winners, their pitchers finished 1-2-4 in ERA, Derek Lowe threw a no-hitter, Nomar Garciaparra hit .310 with 120 RBIs, Manny Ramirez hit .349 with 33 home runs and led the league in batting and on-base percentage and Ugueth Urbina saved 40 games. Yet they still finished 10.5 games behind the Yankees and missed the playoffs for the third consecutive season. Amazing. ... When Seattle's Jeff Nelson pitched in relief Thursday hours after Anaheim clinched the wild-card spot, it marked the first time he had pitched in a game in which his team didn't have a chance to reach the postseason since the end of the 1993 season. ... It was a disgrace the way Milwaukee manager Jerry Royster handled the Jose Hernandez strikeout record. Hernandez was an All-Star and is a good player, but in order to avoid having the shortstop not tie Bobby Bonds' strikeout record, Royster sat him in nine of Milwaukee's final 12 games, including three against a contending team. The strikeout record is a dubious mark but would have been largely ignored outside Milwaukee had Royster not turned it into a major affair. ... If you do anything this fall, go to the bookstore and buy a copy of Richard Ben Cramer's little book, "So What Do You Think of Ted Williams, Now," which reprints his classic and almost impossible to obtain 1986 essay on the late Hall of Famer. Cramer wrote the best-selling biography of Joe DiMaggio two years ago but this lengthy piece from Esquire may be the finest thing ever written about a baseball player. Can't recommend it highly enough. ... And finally, congratulation's to Stark, Minnesota's Myron Seidl, who we suggested would make a great commissioner back in August. Seidl recently was inducted into the Minnesota Amateur Baseball Hall of Fame, an honor he richly deserved. Unfortunately, he still doesn't want to be major league commissioner.

From left field
The National League MVP race is a given -- Barry Bonds. But the American League race is much more interesting with several extraordinary candidates. Clearly, the best player was Alex Rodriguez, who had perhaps the greatest season ever by a shortstop, but it was for a last-place team. Which brings up the age-old question of how much should a team's record weigh in the MVP vote.

A-Rod says that he doesn't know what the criteria are, noting that he didn't win the award when he had a great season with a team that didn't make the playoffs (1996) and also didn't win when he had a great year for a team that did (2000).

On the one hand, A-Rod's season warrants consideration, particularly since he is a shortstop and defense should be considered far more than it is. On the other hand, he isn't just a great player who happens to find himself trapped on a bad team, as Ernie Banks and Andre Dawson were when they won MVP awards for losing teams. Rodriguez quite consciously took himself out of postseason competition for several years when he signed with last-place Texas two winters ago and that choice is significant. He also didn't play well during a string of early games against AL West opponents when the Rangers fell hopelessly into last place (A-Rod hit .185 as the Rangers started 1-6 against the A's and Angels).

With such a tough choice, it's kind of nice the BBWAA doesn't let dot.commers vote. But here's how we would rank them anyway:

Player	The dish
1. Miguel Tejada	Now if only Oakland can keep this MVP
2. Alex Rodriguez	Great season but not one bit of it mattered
3. Alfonso Soriano	Superb season but he had more support than Tejada
4. Garret Anderson	Led more Anaheim comebacks than the Rally Monkey
5. Jason Giambi	But if he's so valuable, how come Oakland won more games without him this year?
6. David Eckstein	One scout's view: "He makes that team go because he always hustles and nobody else wants to be shown up by the midget."
7. Torii Hunter	Late summer slump hurt stats of league's best outfielder
8. Nomar Garciaparra	Yes, he is good enough for Boston fans
9. John Olerud	More consistent than winter rain in Seattle
10. (tie) Jim Thome, Magglio Ordonez	Great season but not enough to overcome Cleveland's fire sale; .320, 38 HR, 135 RBIs -- and no one noticed

Win Blake Stein's money
This week's category: The Deal Included A Call-In Talkshow Host To Be Named Later

Question: Who did the Brooklyn Dodgers trade to get Ernie Harwell as their broadcaster?

Answer: Cliff Dapper. It is not only the only player-for-broadcaster trade ever made by a major league team, it is also widely believed to a more lopsided trade than Lou Brock for Erne Broglio.

No one has ever gone out with more class than Ernie, who finished his career Sunday with a thank you that captured his modesty and eloquence. "Thank you for letting me be a part of your family," he said. "Thank you for taking me to the cottage up north, to the beach, the picnic, the workplace and your backyard. Thank you for sneaking your transistor under the pillow as you grew up loving the Tigers."

He'll be missed.

Infield chatter
"This is Mark from King County Jail."

--How a streaker arrested during last Tuesday's Athletics-Mariners game identified himself when he used his one phone call from jail to call the Mariners post-game show on KIRO radio and ask for fans to donate money to bail him out. And no, we're not making that up.

Jim Caple is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at cuffscaple@hotmail.com.