The Rays hung around in a wild-card spot early in the season, essentially waiting for one or more of the Yankees, Blue Jays, or Twins to snap out of their early-season funk and knock the defending AL champions back off their playoff bubble. could win 100 games and finish with a plus-200 run differential and still see its run of consecutive division titles come to an end. That’s the kind of run a chasing team would kill for in early August.Īnd yet the Dodgers are a game further out of first place than they were at the deadline. That includes a split against Houston, taking two of three on the road from the white-hot Phillies, and a sweep of the Mets that included the Dodgers’ second and third extra-inning wins of the year. Since the trade deadline passed on July 30, the Dodgers are 11-4.
The job now is to keep the AL’s best starting rotation healthy-stay off that throwing shoulder, Carlos Rodón-and make sure Liam Hendriks’s bad weekend (seven runs allowed in 1 1/3 innings against the Yankees) is just an homage to an Art Brut song and not the start of a trend. 1 seed, but with an 11-game lead over second-place Cleveland in the division, they’re basically the only team in the junior circuit that has a playoff spot completely locked down. Sure, they could still make a play for the AL’s no. Tim Anderson’s walkoff home run in the Field of Dreams game will go down as one of the most memorable moments of this regular season-and perhaps the iconic non-Ohtani highlight of 2021.īut with six weeks to go, the White Sox don’t have that much left to play for. They might be the most orange team in the NL, but they’re not about to turn into a pumpkin. And Kevin Gausman has the best ERA+ for a qualified Giants starter since Carl Hubbell.
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LaMonte Wade is hitting home runs at a pace that would give him almost 40 with a full season’s worth of plate appearances. The players who everyone thought were washed up in April have now been producing for four and a half months. Plus, on a squishier but still important note, this team really has nothing left to prove in the regular season.
The Giants’ lead is far from impregnable- can anyone think of another memorable Dodgers-Giants pennant race?-but with only three games left against the Dodgers, they’ll remain in first place even if they lose every remaining game to their closest pursuers. And America’s favorite band of geriatric millennials could soon add newly minted Olympic silver medalist Scott Kazmir to its pitching staff. After stealing Kris Bryant from Chicago in a trade deadline heist and getting Evan Longoria back from a shoulder injury, San Francisco’s lineup is deeper than it’s ever been. It seems like that much-anticipated other shoe is just not going to drop on the Giants, who hold a four-game lead in the NL West with 43 games to play. And they’ve done it fairly quietly for a change. That depth has allowed Houston to weather injuries to the likes of José Urquidy, Kyle Tucker, and Alex Bregman, and stay at or near the top of the AL pecking order in a pretty chaotic season for the rest of the league. No other team has more than three pitchers who meet those criteria. And while closer Ryan Pressly was the only Houston pitcher to make the All-Star Game, the six Astros who’ve thrown at least 75 innings all have an ERA+ of 120 or better (including Lance McCullers Jr., who’s in the middle of the best season of his career). This time around, the Astros are getting above-average production (by sOPS+, or OPS relative to league average production in that split) from eight of nine offensive positions. And while the lack of standout pitching left manager AJ Hinch scrambling after Verlander and Dallas Keuchel took their turns in the rotation, he was able to mix and match enough to find success in the playoffs. Without an easy out in the lineup, the Astros could rip off big innings through both multirun homers and old-school conga line action. That 2017 team had plenty of star power, but perhaps even more important, its pitching and offensive production were dispersed evenly throughout the roster-particularly before the late August trade for Justin Verlander.
No, no, no, not for the reason you’re thinking. The Astros of 2021 are starting to resemble the Astros of 2017. Here’s how those contenders-as well as the clubs who are just playing out the string-stack up. Soon there will be only playoffs and the rush to see which of the 17 teams left in the pennant race will claim the 10 spots up for grabs. With 75 percent of the MLB regular season in the rearview mirror, it’s time for the final power rankings of the year.