As of Monday, it’s officially fall in the Northern Hemisphere, which means it’s about to be October. And that means it’s almost time for the MLB playoffs, which start a week from Tuesday. But even though summer has expired, there’s still some life left in the regular season. A lot of life, actually.
This week wasn’t supposed to be exciting. It was supposed to be a formality, with little at stake besides seeding, if that. More likely, this last week would feature playoff locks resting their regulars and eliminated teams simply playing out the string. It was shaping up to feel like a ninth inning in which the home team has the lead but the bottom half of the frame proceeds as scheduled (which actually was the way major league games were played until 1880 because it was considered poor sportsmanship for the winning team to end the inning early—but that’s an offseason story).
In this case, the outcome is still in doubt because, surprisingly, the playoff field isn’t fully set. “The Playoff Odds Think This Season Is Boring,” read the headline of a piece published by FanGraphs author Davy Andrews on August 5. On August 29, his colleague Michael Baumann posted a piece headlined, “Unless the Reds Do Something Wild, the NL Playoff Race Is Over.” Baumann, my former colleague, wrote, “There has not been a playoff race so settled this early in the season as this year’s National League. At least not in the past 12 seasons. There’s always been someone with some hope in each league. … Not this year in the NL. Barely, this year, in the AL.”
Well, a few weeks have passed, and 96.3 percent of the regular-season schedule is complete, but two teams that were out of the playoff picture then still have a lot of hope. And both of them hail from Ohio: the aforementioned Cincinnati Reds and the Cleveland Guardians, both of whom would actually make the playoffs if they started today—which, luckily for late-September spectators, they don’t.
The Reds are 12-10 since Baumann’s post, which isn’t that wild, but the Mets, whom they were chasing, are 8-14 (and 18-29 since the trade deadline, the NL’s second-worst record). So now the two teams are tied with identical 80-76 records, and because the Reds won their season series against the Mets, Cincinnati holds the tiebreaker. The Diamondbacks, who hold the tiebreaker over New York but not Cincinnati, are one game back of those teams, so they aren’t out of it either, even though they were the second-biggest sellers at the trade deadline. The Giants, Marlins, and Cardinals are three or four games back—mathematically alive, but barely. The Mets will end the season with a pair of three-game series on the road against the Cubs and Marlins, while the Reds face the
On Monday, the FanGraphs playoff odds gave the Mets, baseball’s second-biggest spenders, a 51.8 percent chance of fending off Arizona and Cincinnati, whose combined payrolls add up to $35 million less than New York’s. That leaves a 48.2 percent chance the Mets will miss the playoffs after signing Juan Soto and starting the season 45-24, which would remind Mets fans of their team’s September swoons in 2007 and 2008.
In the AL, the Guardians, who lightly subtracted at the trade deadline and bottomed out on September 2 at a 2.5 percent chance to make the playoffs, are now approximately 60-40 favorites to make it into the tournament. The Guardians have a good chance to advance because they have two paths to the playoffs: a wild card, or a division title. The Guardians and Astros are tied for the third AL wild card at 84-72, a game behind Boston. And Cleveland is also one game behind Detroit, which has been in sole possession of first place in the AL Central since April 5. Three weeks ago, the Guardians were in third place in the AL Central, 10 1/2 games behind the Tigers, and trailed six teams in the AL wild-card race, with three spots up for grabs. Since then, they’ve gone 16-3, while the Tigers, who are 26-33 since the All-Star break and under .500 since late May, have gone 5-11, and the very injured Astros have scuffled to 8-9.
The Tigers’ division lead over the Guardians peaked in early July at 15 1/2 games. No team has ever overcome a deficit of greater than 15 games to win a division or league, so if Cleveland wins the Central, it will be the biggest comeback/collapse ever. Last year, the Tigers shocked the sports world by recording the AL’s best record after selling at the trade deadline, which propelled them to a wild wild-card win before the Guardians defeated them in the ALDS. Now, Cleveland could hand them another defeat as improbable as their surge last season. Adding to the drama, the Guardians and Tigers play each other in Cleveland this week, after which the Guardians will play the Rangers, and the Tigers will ship up to Boston, following a Red Sox series in Toronto.
The AL Central may well go to the victor of this Cleveland-Detroit showdown from Tuesday to Thursday, and unless the Tigers sweep, the Guardians, who haven’t won the World Series since 1948, will hold the tiebreaker. Houston, meanwhile, will play the A’s and Angels, so advantage Astros, as far as the schedule is concerned. But Houston got swept by Seattle (which has never won the World Series) this weekend, leaving the Astros three games back in the AL West without a tiebreaker edge, which means winning a wild card is almost a must for Houston to avoid missing the playoffs for the first time since 2016.
The Guardians aren’t a great team; they have the third-worst offense in baseball, by wRC+, and, as one tweet put it this past weekend, “Their lineup is José Ramírez and a bunch of raccoons in a trench coat.” Even with a strong bullpen (despite the conspicuous absence of Emmanuel Clase) and the league’s best September rotation (despite the similar loss of Luis Ortiz), they’ve been outscored on the season. BaseRuns, a method of estimating a team’s record from its underlying performance, says the Guardians should be 10 games worse than they are, and the Mets, who are hanging on with a jury-rigged rotation composed mostly of prospects promoted since mid-August, should be nine games better. But BaseRuns doesn’t determine the playoff field. According to FanGraphs’ Clutch metric, which measures performance in high-leverage situations relative to overall performance, Cleveland has been the majors’ clutchest team, while the Mets have been the third-least clutch.
From the end of the All-Star break through September 1, the wild-card contenders’ records all clustered in a narrow range between 17-24 and 24-17. The Guardians’ and Mariners’ recent streaks, and the Mets’ travails, have provided a shift from that sustained stretch of mediocrity: A few teams seem to be seizing a playoff spot, or fumbling one away, instead of marking time and treading water. And the odds of some change to the playoff field as it stood at the end of August have more than doubled since the start of September.
The contending teams in question may not be that good, but the competitions between them are. And if you’re looking for another reason to stay tuned to MLB—aside from seeing how much further the Colorado Rockies’ record-low run differential can fall—some of this season’s most exciting awards races have intersected with the remaining races for tickets to October. The Tigers have leading AL Cy Young candidate Tarik Skubal lined up to pitch twice in their final six games. Skubal’s only real rival for the award, Red Sox ace Garrett Crochet, is slated to pitch just once more; he’ll go against the Blue Jays, who are still trying to clinch the AL East. And reigning NL MVP winner Shohei Ohtani, who’s a virtual lock to repeat, will make his last regular-season start on the mound against the Diamondbacks on Tuesday, as the Dodgers attempt to clinch the NL West and Arizona tries to stay alive.