MLB playoffs race

At the conclusion of Sunday’s games, we’ll have exactly eight weeks left in the regular season with the non-waiver trade deadline behind us. That marks a swing point in the baseball calendar, as August and September are when the sport can take on a football-like intensity. Look at this way—teams usually play two series a week. If each series were treated as a single “game”, then there are 16 matchups left—the same as an NFL schedule. Yes, it speaks volumes to how many baseball games there are that we’ve had to play four months to reach this point and still have to treat a three-game entity as a single match, but there’s no question that it times to ratchet up the game-by-game intensity. TheSportsNotebook summarizes the landscape as we turn the corner…