Down the Stretch They Come

There is a reason baseball has the best playoff races, and days like today back it up. Three games to go until the end of the regular season and three teams in the NL still don’t know what their plans will look like in a week.

Will it be playoff baseball under the bright lights of October or drinking fruity drinks with umbrellas under the hot sun?

The National League has three teams that have been unable to lock up their playoff spots, despite numerous chances, and now are forced to tough it out in what will certainly be a hectic final weekend. The Milwaukee Brewers, New York Mets, and Philadelphia Phillies will be battling it out for two spots: the NL East crown and the wild card.

And if you have passed third grade math class, you can see that one team won’t make it.
One month ago, everyone thought the Brewers would be where the Cubs are right now: resting their starters, lining up the playoff rotation, and putting Bernie Brewer on bodyguard duty to make sure nothing happens to CC Sabathia and his golden left arm.

Almost no one thought that the Brew Crew would be playing Chicago the final weekend, trying to lock down their first playoff appearance since 1982.

Practically everything that could have gone wrong for Milwaukee has in that time span. Their bats shut it down. They went on a drastic dry spell, losing 16 of 19 games, starting Sept. 1. Ben Sheets finally got hurt. Ned Yost was fired and replaced by a guy who is most famous for being one of the worst third-base coaches in recent history. And Sabathia still couldn’t beat the Cubs.

If it wasn’t for Prince Fielder’s bat and late-inning heroics, they might actually be out of the race right now. Shocking for a team that was four games up as of late August.

Now they face a crucial three-game series for their season. Since Milwaukee got hot in May, they have played at times like the best team in the NL. Their only kryptonite has been the Cubs, the actual best in the league. Their inability to beat Chicago has been drastically apparent, something even a 5-8  record cannot attest to.

The Cubs just have their number. Look no further than Sabathia. Since joining the team, against the Cubs he is 0-1 with a 4.61 ERA in two starts, against everyone else, he is 10-1 with a 1.42 ERA.

If the Brewers are going to make it, then they will have to overcome their arch-nemesis.

If not, expect a large spike in beer sales in the greater Milwaukee area.

But those fans won’t be the only ones in a drunken stupor; Mets fans have been that way for weeks already. That is the only way to make sense of what has been happening to the Metropolitans. In the middle of September, it seemed the Mets were ready to overcome their epic failures of last year.

Jerry Manuel was the new boss and brought with him a more care-free attitude that livened up the clubhouse and brought Jose Reyes back from his Willie-Randolph-induced coma. They had even overcome their atrocious (and that is an understatement) bullpen to take a three-and-a-half game lead. Yet, if 2007 taught the Mets anything, it’s that the first 145 games don’t really matter.

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