Get ready for a wild, fun, edge-of-your-seat Major League Baseball postseason
By Martin Rogers
FOX Sports Columnist
Here we go, Major League Baseball postseason. What have you got for us? Just a warning, though, we’ve been spoiled these past few months, so this had better be good.
With October now upon us, the annual roll-in of elimination baseball comes with it, resoundingly the most thrilling, unpredictable and just downright fun time in the historic, old sport’s ongoing cycle.
However, after a regular season that brought an embarrassment of riches when it comes to superb individual performances, a spectacular rise of young talent and a breathless finish to divisional slugfests and wild-card chaos, the playoffs have got some living up to do if they’re going to match what came before them.
"This regular season was one of the most exciting in memory," FOX Sports MLB Writer Ben Verlander told me in a telephone conversation this week. "The consensus is that it was simply awesome. That mostly had to do with outstanding young players standing up, which speaks volumes for the game and brings new eyes to the sport.
"Then you have two teams going pedal to the metal in the final weeks, way over 100 wins but still forced to give it everything down the stretch. Then the final three hours on the last Sunday of the season was some of the most enthralling baseball we’ve seen for a long time."
The youngsters igniting the sport are led by Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Angeles, whose two-way exploits defied common baseball thinking and were a joy to behold. With other fearless sluggers such as Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Fernando Tatis Jr. shining, baseball has some box office superstars upon which to hang its hat.
Yet for all the individual brilliance — Ohtani hit 46 home runs and tallied 100 RBIs while going 9-2 with 151 strikeouts on the mound — the most intriguing part of the campaign might have come in the battle to get through to this bit, right here, where everything becomes magnified and the margin for error shrinks to virtually nothing.
That’s certainly the case for the Los Angeles Dodgers, who won 106 games but will face a win-or-go-home wild-card clash with the St. Louis Cardinals on Wednesday because they finished a game behind the extraordinary San Francisco Giants in the National League West.
No one wants their campaign to hinge on a single nine-inning window, so the Giants and Dodgers were going all-out in the final weeks. No resting, recuperating and setting up the playoff pitching rotation here. Over the last 10 games, the Giants went 8-2, and the Dodgers scorched to 9-1 but came up fractionally short.
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The San Francisco Giants clinched their first NL West division title since 2012 with an 11-4 victory over the San Diego Padres. San Francisco will play the Los Angeles Dodgers or St. Louis Cardinals in the NLDS.
In the American League, mass chaos nearly ensued as, going into the final day, the possibility of a four-way tie for the wild-card positions remained feasible. All kinds of quirky permutations would have been required to sort that one out. In the end, it wasn’t necessary, as the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees took care of business and face each other Tuesday at Fenway Park.
It doesn’t get much more storied than that, with an appropriate way to kick off the roller coaster that is bound to ensue over the coming month, with single-elimination games adding a head-scratching wrinkle to any attempt at prediction.
Consider this, though: The Dodgers are still favorites to win it all with FOX Bet (+400), despite the fact that their season could be over Wednesday night.
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Jake Mintz and Jordan Shusterman debate the odds that the Los Angeles Dodgers make the World Series.
If prior knowledge is any assistance, it is to tell us that current form counts for something but not everything, that resilience and a couple of flashes of luck are mightily welcome factors and that everything you expected might just get thrown out the window.
It is also that new stars will emerge from obscurity to help their teams. Think Randy Arozarena for the Tampa Bay Rays in 2020 or Juan Soto for the Washington Nationals a year prior.
"Everyone plans so much, and you expect certain things from the big stars on another team," Verlander said. "Sometimes it takes someone to just come from nowhere to make the biggest impact."
Once things begin Tuesday night, the action barely slows, and it’s all on the line, back closer to what we are used to after the slightly odd (but necessary) shifts made last year to accommodate 16 teams in the postseason of a COVID-curtailed 2020 campaign.
"The goal," Dodgers manager Dave Roberts told reporters, "is to start a new season in the postseason."
That new season is going to be edge-of-the-seat stuff — the format and structure virtually guarantee it. If it matches what we’ve seen the past several months, we’re in for a treat.
Martin Rogers is a columnist for FOX Sports and the author of the FOX Sports Insider Newsletter. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.