Familiarity breeds contempt, as that old saying goes, and so it goes that in this year's suite of division series matchups, we have been gifted some of baseball's best rivalries.
For three of the matchups, the feud is seeded in geographic proximity: Dodgers-Padres, Phillies-Mets and Guardians-Tigers are all interdivision rivals. With Yankees-Royals, it's actually the renewal of a feud in hibernation for 40 years: If you watched baseball in the late 1970s, you remember well that it was once the fiercest rivalry in the game.
As the suddenly resuscitated duel between New York and Kansas City shows, this is the way of rivalries: They ebb and flow when a matchup becomes one-sided for too long or both teams are out of the running for a few years or the teams don't cross paths in a competition for a high-stakes reward.
But rarely does the discord between fan bases completely subside, as new rivals arise and old ones come back and tepid ones heat up. We've got four intriguing rivalries playing out right now, and they have different qualities that mark them as bona fide conflicts. Let's run through them, placing them subjectively in order by heat.