This is baseball's version of Holy Week, and because it is a much less regular occurrence than the tawdry religious hoopdeblah of the same name, its emergence should be celebrated by more than just those directly involved.
It is that rarest of rare white elks, a true multiple-team playoff race, and no it does not matter that the race involved is for the much less climactic extra wild card spots, nor that there are four right answers and roughly twice as many quizzers. It is the beauteous chaos of simultaneous events all emanating import into other corners of the world. Or in English, it's the Royals, Tigers, Twins, and Mariners all fighting for the two American League wild card spots not already claimed by the Orioles, and the Diamondbacks, Mets, and Braves for the final two National League vacancies. All those teams have their evident flaws and alluring charms and fan bases that simultaneously warm the hearts and irritate the spleens; the winners will all both be considerable underdogs against their first-round opponents and teams with not entirely specious hopes for an improbable run deeper into the fall.
Indeed, the only thing that actually sucks here is that there won't be an extra game to settle any ties before the actual playoffs begin, because MLB secretly hates baseball and not only wants games shorter but refuses to provide any entertainment not already scheduled, sponsored, and pre-sold. A 163rd game, which would be objectively good for all Americans, especially if played during the day and shown on television in schools across the nation so that children can piss off their math homework for Twins-Mariners, will be denied us. This may not be Rob Manfred's idea alone, but he has a contract extension that pays him the rough equivalent of Juan Soto's annual salary to be the faintly troutlike expression-free face of the sport, and so this absurdly anti-fun decision is entirely his fault by fiat. He should be shot into the Marianas Trench with cockpit-mate John Fisher. Now onto the baseball.
There is something indisputably delightful about late season gridlock that should be enjoyed for all its chaotic possibilities and permutations, as outlined here. The fun, you see, is not in the Dodgers, Phillies, Brewers, and Padres, or Yankees, Guardians, Astros, or Orioles, but in the tangle of clamoring oddballs just below them. And there is an obvious way to make this week work for everyone, namely:
- For the Royals to lose two of three to the deeply moribund Nationals and then lose two of three to those baffling Braves.
- For the Tigers to be swept by Tampa and then, almost unfathomably, lose one of three games to the White Sox.
- For the Twins to win two of three over the ridiculous Marlins, and then lose two of three to the Orioles.
- For the Mariners to win three of their last five against the difficult Astros and depressing A's.
That puts everyone at precisely 84-78, and makes the final day of the season a pretty impressive hoot. This is all we request, and except for that one White Sox win it doesn’t really seem like too much to ask. Unlike Comrades Anantharaman (Tigers), Xu (Mariners), and everyone else (White Sox), we find a rooting interest in any individual team here to work counter to the desires of the gods, and when we say "gods," we mean "us." Hey, you go to your church, and we'll repossess ours, then gut it and turn it into an Airbnb.
The National League race is, sadly, more straightforward, as the Mets and Braves play a three-banger starting Tuesday night; the angry remnants of a hurricane have added an ominous “weather permitting” to that. If the Mets win two of those three games, they will clinch a place and ruin the whole grift, given that they'll be three games up with three left and will hold the tiebreaker against the Braves, the ill-bred honeybadgers. In that case, it doesn't matter what the Diamondbacks do except remind people that they got to last year's World Series with an even more sorry-ass 84-78 record.
If the deities that are currently too busy ignoring important things like peace, justice, empathy, kindness, and the solar incineration of all future owners' meetings to pay attention to baseball decide to get involved, there is also a way forward to a chaos scenario here. For that, we’d need the Braves to win at least two of the three games against New York and two of the next three against the Royals. We’d simultaneously need the Mets to lose two of the final three games against Milwaukee, and the Diamondbacks to take two games from their final five against the witness protection cult known as the Giants and then the Padres (they already spent one of their losses last night).
But even that is more than we need. We actually don't need the season to end in ties nearly as much as we need everyone to be tied after Saturday. It helps that most of the remaining 34 games are being played at roughly the same time—in the case of the Mets v. Braves, basic principles of reality dictate this—and whether you are a multiscreen nerdburger or an old-timey highlights-from-other-games type, this right here is the reason everyone plays the other 2,396 games.
Think of it: what could be better than Sunday afternoon, when all 15 games will start at exactly the same time, at Comerica Park, with the Tigers needing to win and sending out their best pitcher, Tarik Skubal, against a White Sox team trying to sneak out onto the team bus after four innings. Think, further, of once-disgraced Tigers manager A.J. Hinch closing the game with brand new megaprospect Jackson Jobe—all while, at the same time, the Mariners, who also need the game, send Logan Gilbert to face the clinically depressed A's. All that will be happening while the Braves and Royals face each other in a loser-goes-home game. Then throw in the Twins playing a rest-the-good-players Orioles team and the reeling Mets (they have to reel for this to work, after all) playing the annoyingly competent Brewers? What's the NFL bringing you against all this, Bengals-Panthers followed by Browns-Raiders? Hell, the WNBA might not even have Caitlin Clark in a jaunty eyepatch by then.
Anyway, you all have your own visions of a desirable afterlife, and we have ours. In a world that has spat up Mark Robinson as the new face of an election year, this is our nirvana—to celebrate Holy Week in all its absurdity, if only to prepare ourselves for the apocalypse of shithousery that comes next.
