9 Thoughts On The National League Landscape
The National League has baseball’s best division race and two red-hot races for individual awards. Here’s nine thoughts on the NL landscape with 6 ½ weeks to go in the regular season…
National League playoff race
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MLB Coverage: Can Arizona Or Washington Make The NL Playoffs?
…let’s at least keep an eye on the Washington Nationals and Arizona Diamondbacks, who still have a puncher’s chance of running down a wild-card spot. The purpose of today’s MLB coverage will be to assess what kind of chance—if any—we should give the Nats or D-Backs of making it to October.
National League Playoff Race Update
The biggest series in major league baseball this coming weekend is going to be the NL Central showdown between the St. Louis Cardinals and Pittsburgh Pirates. The Cardinals are playing some good baseball right now, coming off series wins over Atlanta and Cincinnati. The Pirates are sluggish, having lost series to San Francisco and Milwaukee.
MLB Coverage: The National League Playoff Race
If you were hoping for some increased drama in a dry National League playoff race, then this past week was a disappointment. The Arizona Diamondbacks visited the Cincinnati Reds with a chance to tighten up the wild-card picture. The four-game series on the banks of the Ohio River ended with three wins for the Reds and the increasing certainty that we already know the five teams that will be involved in postseason play.
MLB Coverage: The Phillies Let Charlie Manuel Go
Charlie Manuel was fired today as manager of the Philadelphia Phillies. It’s an unfortunate move, but also hardly surprising, given how much the Phils have disappointed for two consecutive years. I don’t see it as Manuel’s fault—the organization shoved all its chips on the table with big contracts to veterans and those vets just couldn’t stay healthy consistently—but it’s hard to deny that it’s time for the Phils to take a new direction.
MLB Coverage: National League Playoff Race
If there was any hope for some extra drama in the National League playoff race, this week pretty much eliminated it. There are still six teams vying for five spots, and when the Washington Nationals were swept by the Atlanta Braves, it not only furthered the Braves’ chokehold in the NL East, it realistically took the Nats off the list of wild-card possibilities.
MLB Coverage: The National League Playoff Race
The National League playoff race stands in sharp contrast to where the American League is at right now. While the AL has nine teams within five games of postseason play, the NL has only six, and it’s looking like the prime drama is going to be the fight in the NL Central to see which team at least earns automatic passage into the Division Series.
MLB Playoff Race: Labor Day Overview
Down the stretch they come! With thirty days left to the end of the MLB regular season, 15 teams are in legitimate contention for a playoff berth and four of the six division titles look genuinely up for grabs. With Labor Day baseball about an hour away as this goes online let’s take a look at the landscape for the MLB playoff race.
Tampa Bay-Texas Tonight Keynotes Early Week MLB Schedule
The Tampa Bay Rays and Texas Rangers have met in the playoffs each of the last two years, with the Rangers winning both times en route to consecutive American League pennants. The October foes square off again to start the week, and while Texas is secure, 5.5 games up in the AL West, Tampa Bay is battling tooth and nail for a wild-card spot as well as keeping their eyes on the New York Yankees ahead of them in the AL East. The Rangers-Rays series in Arlington keynotes the opening half of the week in the race for the MLB playoffs.
American League Wild Card Race Sets MLB Weekend Tone
The American League playoff outlook in general and the wild-card race in particular seem to be getting tighter, not looser, with each passing day and you have two big head-to-head series going down featuring four of the five contenders. Tampa Bay, who holds the top spot right now started a series with Oakland last night in the Trop. And Detroit, who is tied with Oakland and Baltimore for the second wild-card berth, plays host to the Los Angeles Angels who are just 2.5 games out. TheSportsNotebook looks at these series, and the rest of the weekend matchups involving contenders…
Eight Weeks To Go In Push For MLB Playoffs
At the conclusion of Sunday’s games, we’ll have exactly eight weeks left in the regular season with the non-waiver trade deadline behind us. That marks a swing point in the baseball calendar, as August and September are when the sport can take on a football-like intensity. Look at this way—teams usually play two series a week. If each series were treated as a single “game”, then there are 16 matchups left—the same as an NFL schedule. Yes, it speaks volumes to how many baseball games there are that we’ve had to play four months to reach this point and still have to treat a three-game entity as a single match, but there’s no question that it times to ratchet up the game-by-game intensity. TheSportsNotebook summarizes the landscape as we turn the corner…
NL Report: Here Come The Arizona Diamondbacks
The Arizona Diamondbacks have been like the horse who hangs back and hangs back as the race in front of the develops. The spectating public isn’t watching them when two horses (in this case Los Angeles & San Francisco) are running neck-and-neck ahead of them. Then suddenly the horse hanging back gets the inside rail and makes a hard push. That’s exactly what the Diamondbacks have done, as a sweep of the Dodgers this week pulled them to within two games of the lead in the NL West.