Wrapping up the regular season

New York Yankees 3, Baltimore Orioles 2. It’s been a crushing season in Baltimore; almost nothing has gone right for the Orioles. They fired a manager and saw a bunch of their ultra-hyped super prospects — Adley Rutschman, Jackson Holliday, Heston Kjerstad, Colton Cowser, Coby Mayo, among them — falter. This seemed to be the team of the future. The future, alas, looks less bright. The Yankees swept the Orioles over the final weekend, but it wasn’t quite enough as the Blue Jays kept winning … now the Yankees will have to play the Red Sox in the wildcard round while the division-winning Jays get to chill for a week.

Chicago Cubs 2, St. Louis Cardinals 0. It didn’t matter at all for the standings, but it always matters when the Cardinals and Cubs play. St. Louis is on a new path now; their longtime leader, John Mozeliak, is stepping down, their new leader, Chaim Bloom, has his own ideas for what St. Louis baseball means, and the team will try to reenergize baseball’s most passionate city. The Cardinals drew fewer people this year — COVID and the strike notwithstanding — than any season since 1984. The team wasn’t terrible; it just wasn’t much fun. The Cubs, meanwhile, are off to the playoffs for the first time in a few years — they’ll play the Padres in the wildcard round.

Toronto Blue Jays 13, Tampa Bay Rays 4. It was just a weird season in Tampa. The Rays played their home games at the Yankees’ spring training facility, George M. Steinbrenner Field. There’s a statue of The Boss in front, for crying out loud. The Rays do have new ownership now, but they’re likely to remain a bantamweight team punching over its weight. Twenty-one-year-old Junior Caminero had a fantastic year — 45 homers, 110 RBI, and 31 double play grounders. For most of the year, he was threatening Jim Rice’s seemingly untouchable double-play record of 36. But grand records like that don’t go down easily. The Blue Jays needed to beat the Rays to take the division, and they left absolutely no doubts. They finished third in the division in run differential … but that’s not how they measure things in baseball.

San Francisco Giants 4, Colorado Rockies 0: The Rockies lost 118 games — the third consecutive year they have lost 100. And still, the season ending there is bittersweet. A baseball game in Denver is a dream — almost 30,000 people per night showed up for this team that offered so little in entertainment and so little reason to hope for better days. If you’ve never seen a game at Coors Field, well, you understand; it’s worth the trip no matter who is playing. The Giants teased their fans for a while, but this always felt like a .500 team, and they finished with a .500 record. Logan Webb remained a weekly joy. He led the league in innings once again, and this time around even tied for the league lead in strikeouts.

Chicago White Sox 8, Washington Nationals 0. Few would ever call a 100-loss season a triumph, but some interesting things are happening on the South Side of Chicago. Rookie Colson Montgomery has bashed 20 homers in just 69 games. Another rookie, Kyle Teel, is showing some promise. The White Sox are young. Youth is hope. The Nationals did not lose 100 games, and they are also young — highlighted by 22-year-old James Wood, who has immense power (and boy does he swing for the fences; he has struck out 221 times, three of them on Sunday) — but, I don’t know, their season feels a lot more disappointing to me than Chicago’s. The Nats finished in last place for the fifth time in the six years since they won the World Series.

Boston Red Sox 4, Detroit Tigers 3: Both teams are heading for the wildcard round of the playoffs, so there will be more to say about them. I think it should be said now that while the Tigers blew a 15.5-game lead in the American League Central — that’s a record of some kind — but they still have Tarik Skubal and, as such, are dangerous. The Red Sox are badly beaten up, but they still have Garrett Crochet and, as such, are dangerous.

Miami Marlins 4, New York Mets 0: I don’t even know what to say. Have you ever had a friend tell you a terribly sad story, and at the end you find that the only thing you can say is, “I’m so, so, so sorry?” That’s the Mets. They only had to beat the Marlins — who have roughly one-fifth of the Mets’ payroll — to go to the playoffs. They lost without even putting up a fight. Juan Soto ALONE makes as much money as the entire Marlins payroll, and he had an MVP-quality year. He went 0-for-3 and grounded into a double play. It’s enough to make you cry. The Marlins, meanwhile, had a better season than expected; they were outscored by 884 runs, but they were strong in extra-inning games and almost finished .500. Kyle Stowers emerged as a solid hitter.

Philadelphia Phillies 2, Minnesota Twins 1. Minnesota can certainly challenge the Orioles and Braves for the “Most Disappointing Team” award. They were cruising along in typical Twins style for the first couple of months — seven games over .500 in early June, seemingly on the cusp of putting something together — but then the bottom fell out, their pitching collapsed, their offense stopped scoring. It was fun to see Byron Buxton reasonably healthy. He hit 34 home runs, and he stole 24 bases without being caught. The Phillies march on with a first-round bye and World Series dreams. We’ll have plenty more to say about them, I’m sure.

Atlanta Braves 4, Pittsburgh Pirates 1. On the surface, it looks like just another lost year for the Pirates, but it was actually a bit strange. They were very good at home all season — they went 44-37 in perhaps baseball’s best park. But, they were extraordinarily bad on the road, 27-54, only the Rockies lost more games on the road (and they had the consistency to lose everywhere, at least). Paul Skenes had a bananas season — a 10-10 record with a 1.97 ERA. The less said about the Braves, the better. They are happy to have this season expire so they can take a few months to figure out how their collection of superstars managed to finish 10 games below .500.

Cleveland Guardians 9, Texas Rangers 8. On Saturday, I was watching the Cleveland-Texas game and the camera focused in on Rangers manager Bruce Bochy … and he just looked SO old. Yes, he actually is old — 71 this coming April — but he LOOKED old, the first time I can remember feeling that. Bochy and the Rangers both say that they will discuss the future after the season ends, but he looked like a man ready to begin his five-year wait for Cooperstown. Cleveland clinched their playoff spot on Sunday in the most Cleveland way possible, when the marvelously named C.J. Kayfus got hit by a pitch with the bases loaded, driving in the winning run. You won’t believe me, but just before that pitch, I said, out loud, “Oh, Kayfus is crowding the plate, he’s going to get hit by this pitch.” Sometimes in baseball, you can see the future. Then the team somehow won Sunday despite allowing three runs in the top of the 10th inning. There’s magic with this team, and while, yes, everyone expects the magic to end come playoff time, you never know with magic.

Milwaukee Brewers 4, Cincinnati Reds 2. The Reds tried to lose the division. They really tried. They lost two of three to Pittsburgh at home. They lost Sunday to a Milwaukee team playing for absolutely nothing. But the Mets wouldn’t let them lose, and so here they are, going to the postseason to face the Dodgers like this was 1975 and Ron Cey was up against Pete Rose. The Reds are obviously mega-underdogs, but they’ll throw Hunter Greene in Game 1, and Elly De La Cruz can be a one-man wrecking crew, so we’ll see what happens. The Brewers finish with baseball’s best record, and they have to deal with the nationwide expectation that they will fall short in the playoffs again. But it doesn’t have to be that way. This is a terrific ballclub.

San Diego Padres 12, Arizona Diamondbacks 4: The Padres flexed some muscle in their last game of the season, offering some hope that they could be an October time bomb ready to go off. You know the names — Manny Machado, Fernando Tatis Jr., Jackson Merrill, Xander Bogaerts, etc. The Diamondbacks just never fired, even with a very talented cast. Having Corbin Burnes go down at the beginning of June was crushing.

Houston Astros 6, California Angels 2: And so it ends for the titanic Houston Astros, who missed out on the playoffs because (1) Mike Trout bashed two home runs against them on Saturday and (2) they lost to the Tigers 1-0 on August 19 when Kaleb Ort walked in the zombie runner with the bases loaded in the 10th. It’s probably better not to think too hard about how it ended; the Astros somehow won 87 games even after losing Kyle Tucker and Alex Bregman to other teams and Yordan Alvarez to injury. The Angels continue their remarkable consistency as a bleh team; they have lost between 85 and 99 games every full season since 2019. Did you know that the Angels have never lost 100 games in a season? That’s, you know, something.

Los Angeles Dodgers 6, Seattle Mariners 1: Mike Schur sent along a chart that predicts this as the most likely World Series matchup. I don’t have ANY idea how they came up with that — or how you can even pretend to predict what will happen in the postseason crapshoot — but the Dodgers did sweep this series. Sunday, Shohei hit his 55th home run, Freddie homered, Clayton threw 5⅓ scoreless, and we are reminded, once again, that when this team is right, they are downright scary. Seattle will have a few days to rest up before trying to do what no Mariners team has ever done.

Kansas City Royals 9, Sacramento Athletics 2: Brilliant Reader Mark writes in to ask if the Royals are the “okayest” team in recent baseball memory. They finished 82-80 with a 14-run differential. They spent the last three or four months of the season bouncing all around .500 but never getting too far away from it on either side. I think statistically there are probably okayer teams (the Giants, maybe?), but the Royals are certainly okay. They might have been a bit better than that if Cole Ragans could have stayed healthy. The A’s just finished a weird season in a weird place, and nobody really knows where they end up, both literally and figuratively. But Nick Kurtz was a revelation.