LOS ANGELES — It’s fun to try to guess the outcome of the World Series, even if serious attempts at predicting a seven-game set between two excellent baseball teams based on mountains of data will never be significantly more reliable than just flipping a coin seven times.

Here is an unserious attempt at predicting the seven-game set between two excellent baseball teams based on how their home cities stack up in the eyes of someone who has recently been spending time in both. 1. Rap scene: H-Town vs. West Coast

Houston rapper Paul Wall (AP Photo/Rick Maiman)

No one’s here to start beef with the city that produced the Geto Boys, Chamillionaire’s Ridin’ remains a hilarious banger, and from what I understand there are a bunch of rappers the kids enjoy these days that hail from Houston. But c’mon. The Los Angeles area produced Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg and Ice Cube and Kendrick Lamar and… wait, I don’t have to keep listing them, right? One of the few true joys in driving around Southern California is seeing signs for all the places you know from hip-hop songs. “El Segundo? Why, I left my wallet there!” One time, out of curiosity, I visited 21st St. and Lewis in Long Beach, site of Nate Dogg’s fateful dice game. There’s no historical marker there yet.

Edge: Dodgers. 2. Quirky metropolitan feature: Downtown tunnels vs. that empty concrete river thing from all the movies

(AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Did you know that there are approximately six miles’ worth of subterranean tunnels connecting 95 city blocks in downtown Houston? Well, there are. Los Angeles, meanwhile, features concrete channels meant to guide water through the city that almost always seem to be dry, especially when they show up in action movies. And while for anyone from a place where “river” implies “flowing water,” it’s novel to see the big, grey embankments, and while it’s certainly thrilling to know that if the situation calls for it, I could jump my rental Kia over the guardrail and do all sorts of bodacious stuff down there, the empty concrete river thing isn’t really all that useful on the day to day. Those tunnels are air conditioned, and Houston gets humid, folks.

Edge: Astros. 3. Walkability: Poor vs. poor

(AP Photo/Richard Vogel)

It’s fun to walk places sometimes! It’s good exercise, you get to see stuff, and you get to spend time not hunched over a computer or crammed into a car. But while both Los Angeles and Houston rank among the United States’ four largest cities by population, neither has a reputation as a good pedestrian town. Anecdotally, I feel like a well-mapped walking route in Houston — maybe from the museum district, up into Montrose, through the Fourth Ward and north to the Heights — might offer a greater variety of things to check out than most similarly long stretches of Los Angeles, but L.A. offers more places to walk around, plus some of the world’s best people-watching opportunities. Also, downtown Houston completely clears out at night, without even so much as a convenience store open after midnight.

Edge: Dodgers. 4. Presence of this guy: Yes vs. No

(AP Photo/Houston Chronicle, Karen Warren)

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the Astros fan with the righteous mustache, a season-ticket holder named Valentin Jalomo. Jalomo seems to appear in practically every national broadcast from Minute Maid Park, and the mustache remains awesome every single time. The Dodgers may have tons of celebrity fans, but none features that mustache. Larry King oughta grow that mustache.

Edge: Astros. 5. Level of cowboy-hat irony: Low vs. High

Axl Rose (Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images)

I’m not sure “irony” is the best word to describe the motivation behind Axl Rose’s fashion choices, and I get that there are definitely some people around L.A. wearing cowboy hats for straightforward reasons. I’m just saying, people in Los Angeles seem far more likely to pair their cowboy hats with fingerless black gloves, like Axl Rose in the photo above, where Texans appear more likely to pair them with a massive belt buckle and a holstered Leatherman. In Los Angeles, you wear the cowboy hat to show that you’re cool. In Texas, you wear the cowboy hat because you’re a cowboy.

Edge: Astros. 6. Art stuff: The Getty vs. the Rothko Chapel

The Rothko Chapel in Houston.

I get that Mark Rothko was a talented guy and a visionary, and Houston’s Rothko Chapel definitely feels more inspiring to me than any of Rothko’s paintings have in isolation. But I think I was more moved by the interesting and quaint little building and the incredible quiet within than Rothko’s art on the walls, which is just various shades of black. The Getty includes a giant Roman-inspired villa built at the behest of an eccentric billionaire. Let’s not overthink this. Subtlety is overrated.

Edge: Dodgers. 7. Street demonstrations: Crying real tears vs. showing off

(Mark Ralston/Getty Images)

This is true: Over the course of three days in Houston for the first leg of the ALDS, I saw two different dudes out on the street crying real tears. One guy was clearly in the midst of a breakup, the other guy was on the phone. Two, obviously, is a meaninglessly small number to use for real evidence, and that I happened to see two men sobbing on the street in downtown Houston in a short time is almost certainly a weird coincidence. One friend suggested it might be fallout from Hurricane Harvey, but it didn’t look that way at all, and I’m going to choose to assume that in neither case were the tears linked in any way to the disaster and that Houston, despite all the macho Texas stuff, is a place where it’s just OK and normal to come out on the street to weep.

Los Angeles, especially near the beaches, is a place where people come to show off. On the stretch from Venice Beach to the Santa Monica Pier, you can watch people demonstrate their excellence in both somewhat traditional athletic pursuits — yoga, weight-lifting, skateboarding — and less common ones. There’s a woman punching a speed bag, and she’s impossibly good at punching the speed bag. There’s a guy using a hula hoop, and he’s the best hula-hoopist you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s fun to watch, but it’s ultimately unsettling. Houston takes this, because I’d rather know that it’s acceptable to be in touch with my emotions than spend hours contemplating how I will never in my life be as good at anything as this dude is at the parallel bars.

Edge: Astros.

The prediction

Astros in seven.