One glance at the Major League Baseball standings as Labor Day weekend begins suggests there won’t be much jockeying for postseason spots down the stretch.
Entering play tonight, the Seattle Mariners lead the Kansas City Royals by three games in the race for the final American League wild card, and the New York Mets hold a four-game advantage over the Cincinnati Reds in the sprint for the last National League wild card.
This marks just the fifth time since the wild card era began in 1995 that the teams occupying the last playoff spot in each league held a lead of at least three games over their nearest competitor through the games of Aug. 28. (This excludes the 60-game 2020 pandemic season, when 16 teams made the playoffs.)
The schedule also seems to favor the Mariners, whose remaining opponents have a .479 winning percentage, and the Mets, whose upcoming foes have a .517 winning percentage. The Reds (.528 opponents’ winning percentage) and Royals (.513 opponents’ winning percentage) have the third- and eighth-toughest schedules remaining, respectively.
But … weird things tend to happen over the final few weeks of the baseball season.
There have been just three seasons in the wild card era in which nobody climbed into the playoff field after Aug. 28. Fifteen teams in the wild card era have made the playoffs after being at least three games out of a playoff spot on Aug. 28 — including last year’s Mets and Detroit Tigers.
The only other seasons in which the last (or only) wild card teams in each league held a three-game or larger lead as of Aug. 28 also ended with someone mounting a playoff surge.
The 1997 San Francisco Giants, five games back of the wild card spot on Aug. 28, won the NL West. The 2011 Tampa Bay Rays were 6 1/2 games out in the wild card race but went 18-12 the rest of the way and overcame the free-falling Boston Red Sox on the final night of the regular season. Two years later, Cleveland was four games out of the second wild card but ended up hosting the play-in game following a 21-9 finish.
The most famous sprints may have been the first. In 1995, the Mariners made up a whopping 9 1/2 games on the then-California Angels before winning a one-game playoff for the AL West crown (hey Rob, give us back our tiebreaker games). They advanced to the AL Division Series against the New York Yankees, who leapfrogged five teams while overcoming a 4 1/2-game deficit in the wild card race.
The continual expansion of the playoff field (if you don’t like 12 teams, wait until you see the inevitable 16-team tournament) doesn’t leave many Cinderella candidates. Only four teams not currently in a playoff spot have a .500 or better record — the Reds, Royals, Texas Rangers and Cleveland Guardians.
But this strange season, in which the only noticeably good or bad team is the Colorado Rockies (who somehow need to win just five more games to avoid joining the 1962 Mets and last year’s White Sox as modern teams to suffer 120 losses), also means it won’t take much to shake up the playoff race.
With that in mind, perhaps we should all keep an eye on the Giants, who have won an NL-best five straight following a 7-19 skid to get within two games of the break-even mark at 66-68. Remember, nobody saw the Mariners or Yankees coming 30 years ago today, either.