The first two tickets to October got punched on Friday night, and they went to the two teams that spent all summer proving they belonged there. Tampa Bay and Milwaukee are in.
The Rays did it in the most Rays way possible. Junior Caminero hit a walk-off two-run homer to beat Houston 3-1, and a team that never spends money locked up a postseason spot before anybody else in baseball.
Milwaukee joined the party a short time later. Garrett Mitchell hit a grand slam, William Contreras homered and drove in six, and the Brewers beat up on Cincinnati to clinch their eighth postseason berth in nine seasons. At some point we have to stop calling that a surprise and start calling it what it is: the best-run operation in the National League.
Everybody else is close behind. As of the weekend the Yankees were down to a magic number of one to clinch a berth, and the Dodgers were sitting on two. Those are formalities, not races.
The NL Picture Is Already Set
In the National League, the Brewers, Braves and Dodgers are all in position to win their divisions, and the Cubs hold the top wild card. FanGraphs has the Dodgers, Braves, Phillies and Cubs all above 97 percent to make the field. Barring a full collapse, five of the six NL spots are spoken for.
That leaves exactly one real race in the league, and it is the last wild card, where San Diego and Arizona are going at it with about two weeks left. Everything else in the NL is seeding.
The American League has more chaos. Tampa Bay is running away with the East at 90-59, but the Central and West leaders are both hovering right around .500, which tells you how open the bottom half of that bracket is going to be.
So Who Should Be Scared?
The Rays. Easily the Rays.
Ninety wins with that payroll is the story of the season, but the reason they scare me in October is the shape of the roster, not the record. Tampa Bay prevents runs at an elite level and does not beat itself. That is the exact profile that turns a five-game series into a coin flip against a better-funded opponent.
Caminero is the difference. A middle-of-the-order bat who can end a game with one swing changes the math on a team that used to have to manufacture everything. When the Rays have a real thumper, the whole low-scoring, bullpen-heavy formula stops feeling fragile and starts feeling like a plan.
The Brewers deserve respect too, and their bullpen is a nightmare to face in a short series. But Milwaukee has been here before and keeps running into the same October wall. Until they break through, I am going to keep treating them as the regular season’s best team rather than the postseason’s.
The Dodgers will be the betting favorite the second they clinch. They always are. That is a roster built to win 100 games and survive the variance, and nobody should pretend otherwise.
Here is my read anyway: the team nobody wants to draw is Tampa Bay. The Dodgers can outspend the field and the Brewers can out-execute it, but the Rays are the team with elite run prevention and no pressure. Those teams win series they are not supposed to win.
The postseason starts September 29. Two teams are already packing. The rest of the league has two weeks to figure out whether it wants to be the one that draws Tampa Bay in the first round.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.