As if we didn’t love baseball enough as it was, the baseball gods blessed us with two tiebreaker games to settle division titles and then two outstanding Wild Card games to open October.
First, there was the National League tiebreakers: Brewers-Cubs and Rockies-Dodgers. All four teams made the playoffs, but the big question here was who would end up in the Wild Card game the next night to fight for their season, and who would advance to the five-game series in the divisional round.
In the case of Brewers-Cubs, also at stake was home-field advantage for the NL playoffs.
And oh boy did we get two fantastic games. First, during Monday afternoon the Brewers bullpen stifled the Cubs and Milwaukee received clutch games from its former NL MVP (Ryan Braun) and the guy who will win this year’s NL MVP (Christian Yelich). Also, don’t forget Lorenzo Cain’s game-winning RBI single or Josh Hader’s best Andrew Miller impersonation.
Milwaukee won 3-1 to claim the division and the rights to host the Wild Card winner. The Cubs, meanwhile, blew a 5-game division lead in September and had to play 46 games in 48 days thanks to some early season inclement weather. But there are no good excuses in October, right?
In the other tiebreaker, the Dodgers rallied behind the stunning work of Walker Buehler, who shut out the Rockies into the seventh while LA took a commanding 5-0 lead.
The next night in the NL Wild Card game, Colorado and Chicago played a 13-inning pitcher’s duel that saw an unlikely hero emerge — Rockies catcher Tony Wolters drove in the game-winning run with two outs despite an abysmal .170 batting average. In the bottom half of the inning, the guy expected to be the hero — Chicago’s Javy Baez — struck out trying to hit a six-run homer into Lake Michigan.
Kids, if you were watching the game, it’s cool and OK to replicate Javy’s smile, hustle and tagging ability with his glove. But please do not emulate his swing. While I understand the new stat-metrics of launch angle and exit velocity (which are dumb, and I am a guy who is generally all for shifts and playing the numbers), Javy wasn’t even looking near the ball or the zone at the end of his swing. He was looking up at the heavens, where the baseball gods were smirking and saying, “Not today, Satan.” And thus, the Cubs lost and their season is over.
Milwaukee now gets the Rockies, a team nearly identical in how they are built — great bullpen, a group of heavy hitters, MVP candidates and past MVP winners and some young guys trying to take advantage of a rare situation. The Dodgers get the Braves and nobody cares outside of those metro markets.
The AL Wild Card game between the 100-win Yankees and the 97-win Athletics produced a couple monster homers from New York — the team that just set the record for most homers by a team in a single season. But the one play that I will always remember was the Aidney Hechavarria snag at third base. Hechavarria has traveled from team-to-team as a good young player buy not a star. He entered as a defensive replacement and immediate it paid dividends, as he caught a frozen rope off the bat of Marcus Semien using a 40-inch vertical leap straight into the air in the seventh inning.
Now all the networks will be looking at the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry for the ALDS, while the other ALDS matchup between defending champion Houston and Cleveland could be even better. Sure, Boston and New York have a long history of hating each other, ousting one another dramatically in the playoffs and both won over 100 games this year — but Houston and Cleveland have the deepest starting rotations in baseball and some offensive firepower of their own. The winner of that series will get to (and win) the World Series.
There is nothing quite like October baseball in my eyes. Not March basketball and not January football.
To quote Annie Savoy in Bull Durham, “It’s a long season and you gotta trust it. I’ve tried ’em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball.”
— Adam Krebs is a reporter for the Monroe Times and thinks that strikeouts are boring, and besides that, they’re fascist. Throw some ground balls, it’s more democratic. Adam can be reached at akrebs@themonroetimes.net.
