Photo via Milwaukee Brewers/Twitter
Milwaukee Brewers 2021
The final weekend of the MLB season featured several memorable games and moments but, unfortunately, also highlighted one of the game’s awkward realities.
After six months and over 150 games, almost a dozen teams came into the season’s final week with something left to play for, whether they were chasing a playoff spot or just a better playoff seeding. Their jostling for position added a lot of drama to the stretch run but, in a disappointing schedule quirk, very few of those teams actually played each other.
That scheduling misfortune created a significant number of important pennant race games, including all six on Sunday, where the two teams had a significant imbalance in stakes. The 110-loss Orioles, for example, have been out of postseason contention since April but spent their final week as a major player in the American League’s Wild Card race as they faced the Red Sox and Blue Jays. Similarly, the 110-loss Diamondbacks played 16 consecutive September games against teams that all made the postseason. With those two teams facing a steady stream of contenders down the stretch, a lot of baseball’s prime September contests have featured two of the worst teams in MLB history.
The imbalance between teams racing and coasting to the finish line, however, was not just limited to games featuring non-contenders: The Rays had already clinched their postseason position when they went to New York to face the Yankees, and their decision to continue to use their top players through the weekend is a big part of the reason New York needed a ninth inning walkoff on Sunday to avoid a Wild Card tiebreaker game on Monday.
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Avoiding the Wild Card
Meanwhile, the Brewers found themselves in a similar position as they headed to Los Angeles for the final series of the regular season. While the Crew was locked into their position as the NL Central champions and #2 seed in the National League, the Dodgers came into the weekend with an opportunity to chase down the Giants and avoid having to play in the Wild Card. As such, the Brewers’ decision to prioritize health and postseason preparedness over wins in the season’s final week, however justified it may have been, gave the Dodgers an extra boost as they tried to avoid the NL Wild Card game.
The Brewers and Dodgers’ differing priorities, however, took an unlikely turn on Sunday: With one game left to play the Dodgers needed a win and a Giants loss to force a one-game playoff for the NL West. While it didn’t happen, one could argue that the best-case scenario for both the Brewers and Dodgers on Sunday was for the Dodgers to win and reach a scenario where the NL’s two best teams had to play an extra high stakes game.
The Brewers rested Brandon Woodruff and Freddy Peralta, who would almost certainly have been available in a game where the team had something at stake. They led 1-0 in the fifth inning but came apart in a bullpen game and lost 10-3. All told, the six teams with something to play for went 5-1 on Sunday (with the Mariners providing the lone loss) and outscored their opponents 44-23.
The 2021 season’s discrepancies between schedules were already likely a factor in close races even before the season’s final week: Playing the Cubs or Nationals early in the season when both teams still had hopes of contention, for example, was significantly different from playing them after both clubs dealt away many of their stars at the trade deadline. While both of those clubs took major steps back after the deadline, they weren’t even among baseball’s worst teams for the season as a whole: As noted above, two teams lost 110 games this season. Two others lost more than 100 and two more were within five games of that dubious distinction.
It is perhaps fitting, then, that the conclusion to the 2021 regular season featured two things this era of Major League Baseball will be known for: Some of the best and most exciting teams in the history of the sport, and a fair number of their games coming against teams with a much lower incentive to win.
