In a week to the day, the Guardians will be in action at home. They will face the worst team to have managed to qualify in the playoffs.
We also know that the Blue Jays will be playoffs. They officially qualified for the playoffs yesterday afternoon, when the Orioles lost to the Red Sox.
And barring a HUGE disaster, the Rays and Mariners will also be playoffs. The Orioles would have to win almost all of their games and Seattle or Tampa would have to lose almost all of the remaining games on the schedule.
So on Friday, one club (either Toronto, Tampa Bay or Seattle) will go to Cleveland and the other two will face off…somewhere.
Where will this match take place? That’s the 1000 dollar question.
In the American, with the three lead positions pretty much set in stone, the wild card race is the real last fight to watch.
When you look at the state of the standings, it’s easy to think that the Blue Jays have an ascendancy over the others and that Friday night, the second wild card game will take place in Ontario.
But nothing is cast in stone. Why? Because 1.5 and 2.0 games ahead in six and seven games, it’s catching up.
In addition, if there is a tie, the Blue Jays do not have the tiebreaker against either the Rays or the Mariners due to the results of the duels this season.
Journalist Arden Zwelling has prepared a chart that shows how many games each team needs to win at this point to pass the Jays in the standings.
For example, if the Blue Jays are 4-2, the Mariners will need a 6-1 record to pass Toronto and the Rays will need to be perfect.
Me, what I notice is that if the Jays play for .500 (3-3), the Mariners will have to be 5-2 to move up to the number one draft team.
The Rays, them? 5-1. It’s very close to perfection, that.
Because the Blue Jays will face the Red Sox at home (three times) and the Orioles on the road (three times), the club has the means to control its destiny. It starts tonight with Alek Manoah on the mound, by the way.
I don’t want to sell the bear skin before I kill him since Tampa has a nice club, but the Rays start a three-game series tonight in Houston.
Already the club is two games behind Toronto, it will not be easy, even if they finish the season in Boston.
But at the Mariners, nothing is done. After all, the A’s are in Seattle for three games tonight and after that the Tigers are in town for four games in three days. They are “takenable” opponents, we will tell each other.
A doubleheader on October 4 is ordinary, but good.
John Schneider’s men should therefore not take their place as the first drafted team lightly as it could play tricks on them.
We must not forget that the Jays will do everything to reach the objective (to play at home in the series of best second) in 161 games to avoid seeing Alek Manoah launch game # 162 and thus not be eligible at the start of the series. John Schneider really wants home advantage.
Moreover, it is exciting to see these clubs qualify. After all, since winning two World Series titles in 1992 and 1993, the Jays have only gone to the playoffs three times: 2015, 2016 and 2020.
The Mariners, of course, have the longest active streak (2001, as you know) without making the playoffs in North America. There is also talk of the only organization never to have participated in a World Series game.
The Rays have more playoff experience (2022 will be their eighth qualifier since 2008), but to see a small market like this consistently in the playoffs is interesting.
Remember that the wild card series are 2-of-3 from Friday October 7th to Sunday October 9th. Teams that will win both series in each league will advance to the divisional series so the top two clubs in each league have already qualified.
