At the beginning of baseball season, the Inquirer ran a podcast with our baseball predictions.

All three members had the Athletics and Giants making the playoffs, and all three had the Giants in the World Series and one had the A’s in the World Series.

Unlike most writers and broadcasters, I will admit when I’m wrong, and boy was I wrong.

I picked the Giants to lose to the Red Sox in the World Series, after the Red Sox had to come through Oakland in the playoffs. I immediately regret restating my picks in this article because of how wrong I was.

Both the Giants and the A’s were huge disappointments in the regular season, and the Red Sox barely squeaked into the playoffs.

The Giants and A’s had similar seasons, both ending exactly the opposite of what people expected.

Kyle Murphy, a business major and Giants fan, said “it was a major upset for the Giants not to be in the playoffs. A lot of us had faith they would win back to back (World Series), but they ended up disappointing.”

Both teams had high points in the season and made late season pushes but it was too little too late. Rookies stepped up big in the cases of Jemile Weeks, or the A’s, and Brandon Belt, of the Giants.

The reason they had to step up was due to injuries and veterans not producing.

The A’s lost Mark Ellis, Dallas Braden, and Brett Anderson to injury this season. The last two were half of their pitching staff, which was believed to be one of the best in baseball coming into the season.

At the same time, the Giants had injury issues losing Buster Posey and Freddy Sanchez for most of the season. On top of these two main guys, the Giants placed 22 players on the disabled list at points during the season.

“Don’t lose hope. There is always next year,” said Corry Akbarian, a nutrition major and Bay Area baseball fan.

Next year, both teams should get these key players back, excluding Mark Ellis who was traded to the Colorado Rockies. Hopefully, it will bring them back to where they want to be.

It won’t happen unless they get hitting though. Veterans Aubrey Huff and Andres Torres of the Giants , who both came off career years in 2010, fell into major slumps early and couldn’t recover.