Well, Pope Leo gave it a hell of a go, we'll give him that. The former Father Bob, or something, kept the Chicago White Sox in first place in the American League Central for 73 consecutive days, or at least supervised their work well enough to keep them there. The team gave fans souvenir pope hats, and then just kept on giving. Given how unholy the White Sox have been in recent years, the presence atop even this blighted division was hard to believe. As the Cleveland Guardians made their annual September push and the lead got narrower, it got only more so.
But the White Sox have provided, and on Wednesday even offered them their own prodigal son, the spectacularly traveled Tommy Pham. He has already been released by two different teams this year and was sold to the White Sox by a third, but after Pham literally cornered general manager Chris Getz in an elevator after Tuesday's game and all but shook the GM by the eyelids to get himself activated from the injured list, he delivered a three-run homer off a thigh-high curve ball from Cleveland's best pitcher, Parker Messick, to put the Sox ahead in Wednesday's vital game, 3-2.
At that point, Leo must have figured that any help more divinely inspired than that might resemble game-fixing, and stepped away—and soon enough, he found out that this is the American League, where no power is higher than the mean. Within an inning and a half, Cleveland's profoundly whelming Petey Halpin aired out a 3-1 sinker from White Sox lefty Sean Newcomb for his own three-run homer; prior to that, Halpin had been 1-for-35 against lefties this year. Cleveland held on to win, 6-3.
Whatever divinity is working the Guardians' side of the street has belatedly started doing the work Leo has been doing for the last 10 weeks, and the win moved Cleveland into the AL Central lead. That is, it moved them into a first-round playoff bye despite the team being only three games over .500 and having a run differential of minus-seven. The White Sox have lost seven of nine and 12 of 17, leading to the obvious and cheap question, "How do you like your pontiff now, Elmer?"
Theological concerns aside, this reinforces what we have already known about the American League this year—that it clings to the water line with otherworldly tenacity. After 25 and a half weeks of a 27-week season, the American League has only three teams worth the bother, and they're all in the same division. Because of that quirk, Tampa Bay, which has the best record of those three, would receive a first round bye, while New York and Boston, with the league's second and third best records, would have to play each other in the first round for the right to play whatever squawling sack of cats wins the Central, or worse, the West.
Indeed, as Thursday dawned, the Houston Astros, who lost last night to legally dead Kansas City, are the acme of mediocrity at 76-76; the Texas Rangers, who dope-slapped Boston to get back to .500 and into a tie with the Astros, are the apogee of meh. The two teams don't play each other again this season—Texas lost the tiebreaker; with these teams, nobody should be termed as winning anything—and so they could conceivably lose the rest of their games and still fight it out for the division title. This is because Seattle also stinks, and West Sacto and Those Moreno Boys were effectively E'd out in July.
You may have noticed that we are running out of teams, which means that the Toronto Blue Jays and Baltimore Orioles are still hanging around both the edges of the wild card race and the underside of break-even. They both won last night over two abandoned ships, Detroit and the New York Mets, and are now only two days' away from catching the pack. As of this morning, the Unholy Six—well, the Unholy Five and Team Leo—are one game over .500 and have been outscored collectively by 128 runs.
There have been numerous theories put forward as to why the AL is the way it is, and stunningly, none of them have any relationship to Rob Manfred's latest argument for a salary cap. The American League has the second, seventh and 11th highest payrolls according to Spotrac, but also the 24th, 26th and 30th. Really, the only theory you need to know is that the American League is god-awful, no matter whose god your mascot chooses to worship and proselytize. There has never been a team with a losing record to make the playoffs in a full season in baseball history, but this smells like the year. The odor is coming from all directions.
It's the quirky charms of the contenders, much more than the degraded brand of baseball they play, that make this interesting, albeit in a mutated watermelon kind of way. None of the contenders is more charming than the White Sox. Two years ago, they lost 121 games. Last year, they'd cut their failures down to an even hundred. This year, they can reduce it to 80. Those are three numbers that should eliminate any team from playoff aspirations, especially a team without a discernible starting rotation and a lineup built around swinging-from-the-arse homer-mongers and a few veterans they pulled off the curb. The pope thing was just a tortured amusement, or so it seemed until that day in May when they first reached .500, or when they topped the division on June 10, or when they stretched that lead to 5 and a half games over Detroit on August 16. That's when it was clear that the pope was doing some bidness with somebody who is very well backlit.
But there are limits to this. A divine message delivered by Tommy Pham in an elevator? Right. A game winning homer from someone named like the dog in the Little Rascals comedies? Yeah, sure. If there is a message being sent in any of this, it is not a divine one, and more about lowered standards than anything else.
As it stands, the waning days of the season does everybody but Baltimore the same favor—mostly bad teams to beat. The Orioles get Milwaukee, Toronto, and then the Yankees to close out the race, which means that if they manage to make the playoffs, they will have earned it. Conversely, the White Sox close with Detroit, Kansas City, and the gift that keeps on giving, Colorado. We cannot claim with any certainty that the fix came in from Vatican City, but the lord clearly has no part in whatever is going on with the Rockies.
And why shouldn't this all end up going Chicago's way? They're willing to get weird for weird's sake—for example, Tristan Peters' hilarious 18-pitch walk on Monday night, which was the kind of top-grade perversity you would expect from a deity or its minions. Nothing happened in that at-bat, and it took a long time to happen at that, but the White Sox still started a game winning rally out of it. There aren't that many parlor tricks left that we won't find suspicious, so if Leo's going all in, he'd better figure out a way to get his team a starter who can throw five innings. Then we'll know he's back in the game, and that we'll all have to go back to church, out of fear if nothing else.
