A glance at the ranking of Major League Baseball while the weekend of the Labor Day begins suggests that there will not be much jockey for places in eliminatory series in the section.
Upon entering the game this evening, the Seattle Mariners led the Royals of Kansas City by three games in the race for the Wild Card of the American League, and the New York Dies have an advantage of four games on the Reds of Cincinnati in the sprint for the Wild Card of the National League.
This has marked the fifth time since the start of the joker era in 1995 that the teams occupying last place in the playoff series in each league have held a advance of at least three games on their nearest competitor through the August 28 games. (This excludes the 60 -game 2020 pandemic season when 16 teams have made the qualifiers.)
The calendar also seems to promote the navies, whose remaining opponents have a percentage of victories of .479, and the dishes, whose future enemies have a percentage of victories of .517. The Reds (percentage of victories of the opponents .528) and the Royals (percentage of victories of the opponents .513) have the schedules the third and eighth most affected respectively.
But… strange things tend to happen in the past few weeks of the baseball season.
There were only three seasons in the Joker era during which no one climbed in the field of the playoffs after August 28. Fifteen teams at the time of the Joker made the playoffs after being at least three games in a place in the playoffs on August 28 – including last year dishes and Tigers de Detroit.
The only other seasons in which the last (or only) teams of Jokers of each league held an advance of three or more games on August 28 also ended with someone who was mounting a wave of qualifying series.
The 1997 San Francisco giants, five games at the back of the Place du Joker on August 28, won the NL West. The Rays of Tampa Bay 2011 experienced 6 1/2 games in the Joker race, but went 18-12 the rest of the path and overcome the Boston Red Sox in the regular season final. Two years later, Cleveland experienced four games from the second joker but ended up hosting the game game after a 21-9 finish.
The most famous sprints may have been the first. In 1995, the navies constituted a huge 9 1/2 games on the Angels of California then before winning a eliminatory match of a match for the Crown of Al West (Hey Rob, give us our equality broken matches). They qualified for the series of the AL division against the New York Yankees, which made a jump of five teams while overcoming a deficit of 4 1/2 in the race for the Joker.
The continuous expansion of the field of the playoffs (if you do not like 12 teams, wait until you see the inevitable tournament at 16 teams) does not leave many candidates for Cinderella. Only four teams that are not currently in a place in the playoffs have a record of .500 or better – the Reds, the Royals, the Texas Rangers and the Cleveland Guardians.
But this strange season, in which the only substantially good or bad team is the Rockies of Colorado (which somehow need to win five other games to avoid joining the 1962 foods and the White Sox from last year as modern teams to undergo 120 defeats), also means that it will not take much to shake up the eliminatory race.
In this spirit, we may all have to keep an eye on the giants, who have won a consecutive NL-Best after a 7-19 slippage to embark on the two matches of the profitability threshold at 66-68. Remember that no one saw sailors or yankees to come 30 years ago either.
