…let’s at least keep an eye on the Washington Nationals and Arizona Diamondbacks, who still have a puncher’s chance of running down a wild-card spot. The purpose of today’s MLB coverage will be to assess what kind of chance—if any—we should give the Nats or D-Backs of making it to October.
The biggest series in major league baseball this coming weekend is going to be the NL Central showdown between the St. Louis Cardinals and Pittsburgh Pirates. The Cardinals are playing some good baseball right now, coming off series wins over Atlanta and Cincinnati. The Pirates are sluggish, having lost series to San Francisco and Milwaukee.
We’re down to anywhere from 35-37 games left in the baseball season, and the issue of the bullpens will loom large, as they always do, in September. What teams are going to suffer the crushing losses that kill playoff hopes? What teams know they’re going to put a game in the win column if they’re up after six innings? TheSportsNotebook’s MLB coverage focuses in on the American League, to see where this might become a factor.
New York’s arrival back onto the AL playoff race landscape, replacing faltering Kansas City in the wild-card picture is the most significant development of the past week. Here’s a rundown on other notable news in the race…
The Atlanta Braves continue to hold a huge 14-game lead in the NL East, and I think it’s safe to say, in the parlance of political analysts, that we can call this race early.
Since TheSportsNotebook’s MLB coverage in September will be devoted to legitimate playoff races, the Braves are going to mostly fall off the radar, save the jousts for the #1 seed in the National League. But we can’t let this summer pass by without celebrating this team’s achievement, looking at their heroes and what they overcame.
If you were hoping for some increased drama in a dry National League playoff race, then this past week was a disappointment. The Arizona Diamondbacks visited the Cincinnati Reds with a chance to tighten up the wild-card picture. The four-game series on the banks of the Ohio River ended with three wins for the Reds and the increasing certainty that we already know the five teams that will be involved in postseason play.
The Baltimore Orioles have been lurking in the American League playoff race for several weeks now, sitting just outside either first place in the AL East, or the final wild-card spot. The schedule stretch the Birds have coming up likely means that one way or another, the lurking won’t continue much longer, and TheSportsNotebook’s MLB coverage looks to break down the team’s recent form.
The American League playoff race remains by far the more interesting of the two leagues, although it picked up a little clearer focus this week, thanks mainly to the results of the big five-game weekend series between the Detroit Tigers and Kansas City Royals.
It was just a week ago that it seemed safe for our MLB coverage to rule the Cincinnati Reds out of the three-team dogfight in the NL Central. The Reds might have been in great position to make the wild-card game, but they were drifting off the radar for the division title. No more. Cincinnati has had a hot run, while Pittsburgh has struggled and St. Louis not really asserted themselves. Consequently, the Reds enter Friday’s games just 2 ½ behind first-place Pittsburgh, and only a half-game back of St. Louis.
Charlie Manuel was fired today as manager of the Philadelphia Phillies. It’s an unfortunate move, but also hardly surprising, given how much the Phils have disappointed for two consecutive years. I don’t see it as Manuel’s fault—the organization shoved all its chips on the table with big contracts to veterans and those vets just couldn’t stay healthy consistently—but it’s hard to deny that it’s time for the Phils to take a new direction.
Oakland A’s outfielder Josh Reddick has been splashed all over the news this weekend, including on the home page at MLB.com, and with good reason. Reddick went on a power binge this weekend in Toronto, homering five times in two games. But the focus on Reddick’s long-overdue home run surge has obscured the fact that the A’s have fallen hard in the AL West and coughed up a six-game lead in two weeks.
The American League playoff race has the same eight teams in realistic contention that there were when we covered this topic in last Monday’s MLB coverage, but the cards were shuffled a bit, thanks in no small part to the devastation the Detroit Tigers wreaked on the city of Cleveland.