Mark Whicker: High drama, but there could be more September diamond drama

Soon-to-be free-agent slugger Anthony Santander of the Baltimore Orioles is trying to help his club to a post-season berth. He’s on the top of the Blue Jays off-season shopping list for a thumper.

August 29, 2024

By Mark Whicker

Canadian Baseball Network

The night of Friday, Aug. 23.....now, that was baseball.

In Baltimore, Anthony Santander grand-slammed Houston Astros Bryan Abreu in the eighth inning, and the Orioles won, 7-5. That kept them within a game and a half of the New York Yankees, who were beating the Colorado Rockies, 3-0.

In Los Angeles, Shohei Ohtani had an even later grand slam up his sleeve. Tied 3-3 after a badly-needed six innings from Bobby Miller, the Dodgers got the bases loaded, and Ohtani went deep off Colin Poche in the bottom of the ninth with two out.

In San Diego, the Padres kept pace with the Dodgers’ 7-3 victory. Joe Musgrove gave the New York Mets only one hit in seven innings, and San Diego remained four and a half games behind the Dodgers and a half-game behind Arizona.

The night of Saturday, Aug. 24....that wasn’t bad either.

The Orioles this time were losing, 2-0, to Houston as they approached in the bottom of the sixth. Jackson Holliday, last year’s first-overall draft pick who was hitting .175, came up to pinch-hit with the bases loaded. His double cleared those bases, and Baltimore pulled out a 3-2 lead. The Orioles also picked up a game because Colorado beat the Yankees, 9-2.

Back to Dodger Stadium. Tampa Bay’s 21-year-old Junior Caminero tied it 7-7, in the ninth, with a homer off Evan Phillips’ 3-and-2 fastball. In the top of the 10th, Jose Caballero homered off Joe Kelly for a 9-7 lead. Reliever Garrett Cleavinger, a former Dodger, had to solve Ohtani, with a ghost runner on second, but did so on a flyball to right. Mookie Betts followed with a sacrifice fly (or, as Vin Scully would have said, a non-scoring fly ball, since there was no intent to sacrifice), and Tampa Bay exhaled hard after the 9-8 win.

As that went on, the Padres were battering the Mets, 7-1.

The day of Sunday, Aug. 25....things got more real.

Houston and Baltimore were tied at 3-3 when Alex Bregman and Yainer Diaz homered in the eighth. The Astros won, 6-3, and Baltimore again fell a game and a half behind New York, which battered Colorado, 10-3. Aaron Judge picked that day to become the fifth player in major-league history with three 50-homer seasons.

The Padres were down 2-0 to the Mets, but Jurickson Profar homered in the eighth inning to tie the game. Rookie Jackson Merrill came up in the ninth against closer Edwin Diaz and pounded a game-winning homer off a 2-0 slider. For Merrill, it was his fourth game-winning or game-tying home run in the eighth inning or later since July 30.

But the Dodgers wouldn’t buckle this time. In the 13th inning, Betts homered off Richard Lovelady for a 3-1 lead, and L.A. remained three games ahead of Arizona, 4 1/2 over San Diego.

Every time a Blue Jays fan sees Shohei Ohtani with the Los Angeles Dodgers — he wonders ‘what if’ Toronto has signed him. And the man loves dogs.

Thursday, Aug. 29.....it had its moments, too.

Ohtani dressed up his dog Decoy in a No. 17 uniform and had him deliver the first pitch. Decoy rushed off the mound, galloped 60 feet, six inches, and surrendered the ball to his master.

After that bit of “pitching,” Decoy swung his paw and sent a Milk-Bone 449 feet into the right field pavilion, and the Dodgers beat Baltimore. Arizona remained three games behind the division leader by beating the Mets, 8-5. Two walks by Diaz loaded the bases in the eighth, and Corbin Carroll lofted a grand slam.

In Cleveland, the Royals had already won the first three games of their AL Central shutdown series and were up 5-3 in the seventh inning on Thursday. But the Guardians staged a four-run seventh, with the decisive single coming from rookie Jhonkensy Noel, who is 6-foot-3 and 250 pounds and is known as Big Christmas. Cleveland thus regained a one-game lead over the Royals.

Great stuff.

But just think. What if all those dramatic blasts and reversals of fortune had meant anything?

In such a world, fans in Baltimore and New York would have been checking their Statcast re-creations of the game involving their rival. Or they would have been staring at the scoreboards. They would be looking ahead to possible pitching matchups far down the road.

Same with the Dodgers, Diamondbacks and Royals in the NL West. Same with the Royals, Guardians and Twins in the AL Central.

Those parallel moments were once the best thing about August and September. They were called “pennant races.” If you didn’t win you didn’t get in, regardless of how many games you won. Perhaps the final zero-sum pennant race was in 1993, when the Giants led the old NL West by 9 1/2 games on Aug. 6. But they couldn’t put enough ground between themselves and Atlanta to ignore the hoofbeats.

The Braves went 5-1 in two series with the Giants and cut the lead to 3 1/2 and then San Francisco had a seven-game losing streak that ended on Sept. 15. It fell four games out but rallied, and still managed to take it to the final day, when they tried to finish off a four-game sweep in Dodger Stadium but were forced to start young Salomon Torres and lost. The Giants won 103 games that year, their most since 1905, but were couch-bound.

Obviously there is no need to remind a Canadian audience about 1987 and the final series in the American League East, or to encourage the youngsters to fire up their search engines for “Frank Tanana,” so I won’t.

Now Baltimore can catch and pass the Yankees and pop champagne and prepare a banner, and it wouldn’t be worth a warm National Bo. The reason is that six teams will represent each league in the postseason grid, including three wild-cards that fell short of first place in any of the three divisions. Both the Orioles and Yanks will comfortably make the cut. This isn’t a head-to-head competition.

This is like Noah Lyles, getting through his 100-meter heats at the Olympics. They’ll do just enough to advance.

Actually winning the division, and getting a first-round bye and the privilege of starting at home is worth nothing. In 2022 and 2023, the teams that had those alleged perks went 3-5 against the teams that won wild-card series. In each season, a National League wild-card winner got all the way to the World Series.

Under Rob Manfred, the major-leagues has shown so much contempt for the 162-game season that you wonder why they don’t retreat to 154. The Lords of Baseball take their teams out of rhythm and march them to Williamsport, Birmingham, an Iowa cornfield, London and Seoul, under the approving eye of ESPN or Fox. They make every team play at least one series against every other team, a cumbersome process in itself, but then they refuse to realign so the Yankees and Mets, to use one example, could play 12 games instead of four or six.

The masterminds would answer by pointing out the torrid races to get that coveted No. 6 position. The Braves are in the process of fending off the Mets to get the last seat on the NL ride, and Minnesota is three games ahead of Boston for the final AL wild-card. Some announcer was speculating that Detroit was actually in the race because it was 4 1/2 games behind the Twins. Detroit is one game over .500.

Imagine the sizzle of the final week of the season if teams had to win their divisions to keep playing, had something to win or lose. From Sept. 24-26, Baltimore plays at Yankee Stadium.

The Padres are in Los Angeles. (And, yes, the Mets are in Atlanta.)

Then, on the final weekend, San Diego is at Arizona. Kansas City is at Atlanta and would be eyeing a scoreboard for news on Houston’s series at Cleveland. The Orioles are at Minnesota, which theoretically could be arguing for the AL Central lead, while the Yankees are at home against Pittsburgh. Maybe Judge would have to hit a home run off Paul Skenes to get the Yankees in. Would there be any drama there?

At the very least, baseball should use its authoritarian tendencies to ban champagne for clinching a playoff spot, or even for winning a wild-card series. It’s unfair for clubhouse attendants to clean up the room five times. Plus, a real pennant race should feature fewer grapes and more wrath.