Baseball’s marathon of a season breeds a stoic culture often espoused by players and managers: never get too high or too low. Except in September, when they cannot help themselves.
This week, when the Houston Astros rallied improbably in the ninth inning with five runs to beat the Los Angeles Angels 5-3, the emotions were extreme.
“Down to the last strike, then you put up a five-spot,” excited home-run hero Jed Lowrie told the Associated Press.
“It’s about as dramatic a momentum shift as you’re going to see.”
And the Angels know it, too.
Instead of moving within 2 ½ games of the American League West leading Astros, and three back for a wild card, they dropped 4 ½ and four back, respectively.
“We have to turn the page on it,” the Angels manager Mike Scioscia said.
“Sometimes the page is heavy, like this afternoon.”
Later in the week, it was the Astros feeling the pain after being overwhelmed by the charging Texas Rangers and dropping out of first place for the first time in two months.
“This is really intense baseball,” Houston manager AJ Hinch said. “It’s fun to do it. It’s not fun to lose.”
The September theatre, of course, has been boosted in the last four seasons by the addition of a second wild-card spot. More play-off spots available, more teams dreaming big.
After all, the two World Series participants last year, the Kansas City Royals and the San Francisco Giants, entered the post-season as division runner-up wild cards.
In the American League, the Royals have all but wrapped up the Central Division. But the Toronto Blue Jays and New York Yankees are still squabbling for the East; the Rangers, Astros and Angels for the West; and they all have to keep one eye on the wild-card standings, if the division title thing does not work out for them.
The Minnesota Twins and Cleveland Indians still have wild card chances, as well, despite having been left in Kansas City’s Central Division dust by August. Until recent skids, the Baltimore Orioles and Tampa Bay Rays also pictured themselves in the race.
In all, 10 of 15 AL franchises entered September alerting their hot dog vendors not to make October plans.
Then, unfortunately, there is the National League; the land of eerie, wild card silence.
For the first time since the 2012 introduction of the second spot, none of the intended late melodrama has surfaced.
Why? Five very good teams, 10 not so good.
In early September, when the NL West-leading Los Angeles Dodgers swept the second-place Giants, and the New York Mets did the same to the runner-up Washington Nationals in the East, those division races ended.
Meanwhile, in the Central, the St Louis Cardinals, Pittsburgh Pirates and Chicago Cubs built the three best records in the NL. By September, that trio had ruined wild card options for everyone else.
A flukey turn of events? Let us hope so. At this point, it appears the Pirates and Cubs will face off as wild cards, with the winner meeting the Cards in a NL Division Series.
“In this division, we all respect each other,” Pirates manager Clint Hurdle told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “But nobody likes each other.”
In lieu of dramatic September chaos in the NL, feuds will have to do.
Collins ahead in the vote for season’s best
Baseball managers, take heart. Back in 1983, movie legends Dustin Hoffman, Paul Newman, Peter O’Toole and Jack Lemmon all were beaten in the Academy Award voting, when Ben Kingsley won the Oscar for Best Actor.
Similarly, there are plenty of deserving men for Manager of the Year awards, but only room for one name per plaque.
And, now, envelope, please … let us give it to Terry Collins of the New York Mets in the National League, and, well, we may have to wait until the season’s final out before the American League picture clears up.
First, Collins should win over the Chicago Cubs’s always-inspiring Joe Maddon. Both teams accelerated ahead of schedule, with young players shouldering heavy loads. But Collins’s Mets endured despite a long, demoralising stretch of meagre offence, and also knocked off supposed Goliath, the Washington Nationals.
In the AL, if the superstar-less Minnesota Twins reach the post-season, give the hardware to Paul Molitor for leading the most surprising, upwards leap.
If not Molitor, and the Texas Rangers surge into the play-offs, Jeff Banister should win for pulling his team out of Nowheresville. But that means AJ Hinch gets ignored after deftly overseeing the rise of the recently pathetic Houston Astros.
And John Gibbons would get overlooked after patiently pushing the Toronto Blue Jays to their first post-season since 1993. Not fair?
Hoffman, Newman, O’Toole and Lemmon fans know it.
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