Okay, we started with 30 teams back in early April, and now Major League Baseball is down to its Final Four Tournament. Coincidentally, both leagues saw their first-round playoffs result in the Eastern Division champion being knocked off by a wild-card team coming out of the Western Division, and the Central Division champion ousting the West champion. The favorites to get to the NL Championship series — Atlanta and Arizona — lost in the division series, while the 103-game winners in the AL — New York and Oakland — also said sayonara in the first round.

Funny thing is, for part-time or provincial baseball fans, the only players we were really familiar with were either the hated Yankees, the annoying Braves, or the ace pitchers of the A’s or D-Backs. With the four teams that remain, casual baseball fans will be hard-pressed to name more than a handful of players from each team’s roster, and maybe even are perplexed as to whom they should root for — assuming they still care.

Sure, there are some superstars remaining among the four contenders: San Francisco has Barry Bonds, St. Louis has Tino Martinez, J.D. Drew, and Jim Edmonds, and the Angels have ... let’s get back to them. The Twins boast big-time players like ... well, there’s, what’s-his-face ... Oh-kay. Looks like we’ve got a problem here. If we’re not die-hard baseball fans, but still are fans of the game itself, who do we back if we don’t even know the cast of characters? Who in the heck are most of these guys? Jack Cressend appeared in 48 games pitching for what team? Bobby Kielty batted .291 in 112 games for whom? Tsuyoshi Shinjo collected 86 hits for what remaining playoff team? Placido Polanco hit .284 in 94 games for somebody here? For God’s sake, who?

For the record, the answers are the Twins, Angels, Giants, and Cards, respectively.

Could be a problem in the next few weeks, eh? Well, that’s why your faithful correspondent puts pen to paper twice a week; to make your sporting life easier to figure out. So let’s break down the NLCS and ALCS and determine who’s worthy of our support, using roster members, managers, and the teams’ respective fans, facilities, and cities as elements for comparison purposes.

ALCS: Minnesota versus Anaheim. Twins have home-field advantage. The Fox network, which has the broadcast rights the rest of the way through the World Series, must have had conniption fits when the smoke cleared after the earlier round. After all, network execs must have licked their chops at the potential Yankees-A’s match-up, which would have been a rematch from their thrilling five-game division series last year. When both teams instead crashed and burned, Fox was left with the Twins and the Angels. Exciting and deserving teams, yes, but hardly the kind that allow for full-barrel promotion. "Homer hankies versus thunder sticks! Watch Troy Glaus try his luck against Brad Radke! Can Latroy Hawkins silence the explosive Brad Fullmer once and for all? Tonight on Fox!"

First let’s look at the players: there are plenty of less-than-household names on both sides, no doubt. The Twins have no Kirby Pucketts or Dave Winfields or even Paul Molitors; instead, the team’s got sensational outfielder Torii Hunter, who hit .289 and collected 29 homers and 94 RBIs during the regular season, though you may only remember him as the centerfielder who denied Bonds a home run in the All-Star game with a sensational catch over the wall. I could dissect the rest of the roster, but you’d still wonder, "Whodat?" Let’s leave it at this: the Twins are a vanilla team whose payroll is 28th in the 30-team majors, and a franchise the commissioner of baseball wanted to eliminate last off-season. The Twins in the past always played hard because of low-key manager Tom Kelly — and even won titles in 1987 and 1991 — and after his retirement in the off-season, the team continued to play hard-nosed ball under former Met Ron Gardenhire. In a mediocre division, the Twins led throughout and won by 13 and a half games over Chicago, and no other team in the Central was within 20 games at the final gun. If you’re looking for particular players to root for, well, consider everybody, since there isn’t a position player making over $2.15 million, and long-time ace Radke actually signed a contract extension a few years back in lieu of fleeing town for a brighter spotlight and a fatter paycheck.

Traditionally, the Twins have not been a dominant force in baseball, but that’s usually because of tightfisted ownership and, for free agents, the unappealing prospect of playing in Minneapolis and the worst stadium in baseball, the Metrodome. The fans seem to be primarily bandwagon-jumpers, as the team averaged between 14,000 and 18,000 for home games (with a paltry 12,355 average in 2000) in the past eight years in a stadium that holds 56,000-plus. Only in its post–World Series years of ’88 and ’92 did the team regularly draw more than 30,000 a game, and this inconsistency highlights the fact that this is hardly a hard-core baseball town. The persistence of the fandom waving those annoying "homer hankies" is also an affront to true aficionados of the game, but the Twin Cities area still deserves to have a team, and its support this year has created a significant home-field advantage for this year’s edition. The Twins win with defense, pitching, and clutch hitting, but they are an average team on the road (40-40 this year). Nonetheless, of the four remaining teams, they have as good a chance as any. One final thought: it’s mind-boggling to think that the small-budget, small-market Twins are on pace to reach — and potentially win — their third World Series since the big-budget, big-market Red Sox reached their last Fall Classic.

The Angels are also full of no-names, and how they actually knocked off the Yankees is a mystery left to the historians. Nonetheless, they too are an underpaid and overachieving team, with no $10 million players, and just five making more than $5 mil annually. They are scrappy, opportunistic, and frequently show the grit and character of their manager, former catcher Mike Scoscia. Leadoff hitter David Eckstein, a former Red Sox product, is only five-foot-eight, but his heart and determination overcome his diminutive stature, and he is often a catalyst for the team’s offense. The Angels’ starting pitching is pretty good, but it’s set-up sensation Brendan Donnelly and closer Troy Percival who traditionally close the deal in Anaheim’s victories. Fans of this team are long-suffering, as devastating playoff losses in 1983 and 1986, along with an incredible flame-out late in the 1995 season, have prevented the franchise from writing any real success stories. Nonetheless, though patrons traditionally arrive late and leave early — and have lately taken to thwacking those ridiculous "thunder sticks" in the stands — Edison Field has been drawing an average of over 21,000 for the last 25 years. The team — a popular pre-season pick for last place — has overachieved more than any other team remaining in the playoffs, and deserves your support. One final thought: you think the Angels would have reached this level if fat load Mo "It’s not about the money" Vaughn were still playing here?

NLCS: St. Louis versus San Francisco. Cards have home-field advantage. We’ve mentioned this before, and we’ll mention it again: St. Louis is America’s best baseball town. It hasn’t had a World Series champ since 1982, but it has averaged over 30,000 fans a game for each season since 1984 (except for the post-strike year of 1995). While it seems the Redbirds are always in the playoff hunt, the fact is that they haven’t played for a pennant in six years, when they blew a 3-1 NLCS lead to the Braves, and haven’t been in the Series since 1991, when they lost a memorable seven-game series to the Twins. Despite the deaths of long-time announcer Jack Buck and starting pitcher Darryl Kile, the Tony La Russa–led Cards rallied in the second half of the season to win the NL Central by 13 games. Boasting a nice mix of veterans (former pinstriper Martinez, Chuck Finley, and Edmonds) along with rising stars (Drew, Matt Morris, and Scott Rolen), St. Louis wins with excellent infield defense and a strong bullpen. Yet for all his accolades, La Russa’s only won one title (with Oakland in ’89), although he has led three different teams in three different eras to the post-season. But with Rolen doubtful to play in this series and the Cards already in a 2-0 hole heading to the Bay Area for the next three, the team’s hopes for its first championship in 20 years may soon be dashed. And though the city’s due, La Russa’s due, and the franchise deserves some redemption for all the heartache it’s been through this summer, after sweeping defending champion Arizona in the division series, the Redbirds may have met their match in the wild-card-winning Giants. One final thought: Mark McGwire must be pissed that he retired prior to this season.

The Giants went 25-8 down the stretch to clinch the playoff spot over the Dodgers. They have a beautiful new ballpark, a cathedral by the cove that makes wind-swept Candlestick Park a distant memory. The Giants have drawn an average of 40,000 fans in each year of Pac Bell Park’s existence, but those numbers are tainted somewhat by the fact that many folks came out only to watch Barry Bonds chase home-run history. Nonetheless, the Giants have never won a World Series since moving west from New York in 1958; they have only been in one Fall Classic since then, and that appearance was significantly disrupted by the earthquake that struck the Bay Area prior to Game Three. The Giants have a likeable and deserving manager, Dusty Baker, but they also have at least three players who are very easy to dislike: Bonds, Jeff Kent, and Kenny Lofton. Bonds may be the premier player of our era and a potential career home-run king, but he is one of the biggest jerks in the game, and despite his achievements, it’s difficult to root for him. Kent made headlines last spring by claiming to have broken his wrist by falling off his truck while washing it, but evidence later surfaced that he had instead gotten injured doing wheelies on his motorcycle (Kent’s $6 million contract with the team prohibited riding the bike, but not washing trucks). Lofton has long been viewed with disdain by the media; he was the center of attention in NLCS Game One Wednesday when he took exception to an inside pitch, and his inane yapping sparked a bench-clearing incident. Nice guys, all. One final thought: after eight stops over the course of 17 seasons, 1987 Rookie of the Year catcher Benito Santiago could be reaching the World Series for the first time.

It’s hard to root against a franchise like the Giants based on the personalities of just three players, but given the choice, I’ll give my backing to the team that seems to be made up of character and team-based individuals, and I believe they’re more prevalent in St. Louis than the city by the bay.

And in the other series, well, to be honest, Anaheim deserves a World Series berth much more than Minnesota, despite the cloud of contraction that loomed over the Twins franchise during the past off-season. After all, the Twins have won a couple of recent titles, and it’s obvious that there are just too many Johnny-come-lately "fans" that show up at the Metrodome only when the team’s winning.

So bring on the Angels and the Cardinals in the World Series; red versus red, West Coast nonchalance versus Midwestern passion, zero pennants versus 15 pennants, jerseys featuring haloed A’s versus birds on a stick. And not a pinstripe in sight.

Not exactly the marketing bonanza that Fox Sports would have liked to unleash on the viewing public, but it’ll have to do.

Sporting Eye runs Mondays and Fridays at BostonPhoenix.com. Christopher Young can be reached at cyoung[a]phx.com