The National League Wild Card race is the most chaotic in baseball with 24 games to go, and the Arizona Diamondbacks are somehow sitting on top of the third and final spot. They are half a game up on the San Diego Padres, and behind those two there are four or five other teams within striking distance.
Nobody thought the Diamondbacks would still be in this conversation on September 3. They lost multiple key pieces to injury by June, their bullpen has been shaky, and the offense has been streaky at best. Yet here they are, holding on with a rotation that has quietly been one of the most reliable in the National League when everyone is healthy.
Zac Gallen has been vintage. Merrill Kelly is doing his usual thing. Corbin Carroll is finally healthy in the outfield and has been producing at the top of the lineup the way Arizona always expected.
The Padres, meanwhile, are the more talented team on paper. Manny Machado is still Manny Machado. Fernando Tatis Jr. is having another All-Star caliber season. Their rotation, if you count Yu Darvish and their high-priced acquisitions, should be dominant most nights. And their bullpen has better arms than Arizona’s.
So why are they trailing? Because they cannot win the games they are supposed to win. San Diego has been remarkably bad in one-run games all year, has lost several series to teams under .500, and has a manager in Mike Shildt who is starting to hear the boos when things go sideways at Petco.
Behind these two, the Cincinnati Reds, the St. Louis Cardinals, and even a couple of dark horse teams like the Marlins in Miami are still technically alive. The Cardinals have played better second-half baseball than anyone predicted. The Reds have the young pitching to make life miserable in a short series if they can just get in.
My honest read is that the wild card race is going to come down to the final week. Arizona and San Diego play each other three times in mid-September, and that series probably decides which of them holds the final spot. The Padres have a slight rotation advantage, but Arizona has home field for two of the three games.
The winner of that series has to then survive a road trip that includes stops in Denver and Los Angeles. Neither is easy. The Dodgers have been resting stars in September to gear up for the playoffs, but even a rest-mode Dodgers team is dangerous.
For the losing team, the wild card door does not fully close, but it becomes a lot harder. They would need to essentially run the table the last ten games while hoping for help from teams playing the leaders.
What makes this race fun is that there are no dominant teams in the mix. Any of the five or six clubs still alive could win nine of their last ten and grab a spot. That means we get meaningful late-season baseball in multiple cities, which is exactly what September is supposed to feel like.
The Diamondbacks are the underdog nobody sees coming. If they hold on, they get to walk into the wild card round with house money and a rotation that could steal a series.
Wild card baseball is about to get very, very interesting.
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.
