The Impending One-Game Showdown Between the Second and Third Best Teams in Baseball
By: Jeff McDonough
Am I dreaming, or is this really about to happen? Last night the St. Louis Cardinals downed the Pittsburgh Pirates and won their 100th game to clinch the National League Central division title. This was not a particularly surprising fate for the redbirds, seeing as they have been leading the division for months and hold the best record in the majors. The takeaway from them locking up the Central lies not with the Cardinals themselves, but with the two teams that trail St. Louis in the standings. With two more victories, the Pirates will reach 98 wins — a W-L record that would’ve been good enough for best in the MLB the last three seasons. In 2015, it’s not even good enough to win their division. We’ve seen two really good teams in the same division before though — the Red Sox and Yankees were doing it for years. In 2001, the 102-win Athletics had to settle for the wild card after Seattle won an MLB-record 116 games. The real story here is the emergence of a third NL Central team, the Chicago Cubs.
Everyone knew the Cubs were going to be better, but I don’t
think many saw this coming. Entering year four of the Theo Epstein era in
Chicago, the Cubs finally had some buzz after three consecutive last place
finishes in the division. Manager Joe Maddon was brought in after a freak sequence
of events allowed him to opt out of his contract with the Tampa Bay Rays. The young core Epstein had
assembled also looked poised for progress, but the progress came instantly. The
Cubs, who have 93 wins with four games remaining, currently sit at not only
third place in their division but third place in all of baseball. That’s right,
the third place Cubs have a better record than the leader of every other
division in baseball. In the race for the second wild card, no team is within
10 games of them. Yet they still trail the Pirates by 2.5 games, and will
likely lose out on any home field advantage. If the Cubs can keep their hold
on the #3 spot over the Blue Jays and Royals for the next four days, the 2015
NL Central will become the first division in history to have the majors’ three
best teams. And need I remind you that there used to be only two divisions, not
three, and that the NL Central used to have six teams, not five. So it’s only gotten more difficult, which makes it all the
more impressive.
So last night, the Cardinals made official what we’ve known
was coming for months. This Wednesday, October 7 at 8 p.m. on TBS — preempting
a rerun of Seinfeld, I presume —
the Pirates and Cubs will duke it out in a winner-take-all Wild Card Game, with
the winner going onto the Division Series to face the Cardinals and the loser
going home. The march towards this inevitability has felt like a daze. Is this actually
happening? How is the NL Central so good? Is this new format awesome or awful? Are
we seriously about to watch a 95-win team go home after one game? And how crazy
of an environment will that game have with stakes this high? Well, most of those
answers are apparent now. It was a pretty listless race to get to this point
though. There was a clear hierarchy in the standings. The Cardinals were better
than the Pirates, the Pirates were better than the Cubs and the Cubs were
better than everybody else. But now that we’ve reached this point, and we know
it’s actually going down, it’s abundantly clear that this game is about as huge
a deal as games get.
