Ranking MLB's Best September Hot Streaks in Recent History
It's getting near time for teams across MLB to wave goodbye to the 2024 regular season, but not before they first say hello to September.
With any luck, one of them will live up to the more prominent examples of how to own the season's final month.
There have been plenty of remarkable September hot streaks throughout MLB history, but the focus here is on the 10 best since the 2010 season.
Lest anyone think this was a simple matter of rounding up the best September/October records—there are too few games in October to treat it as a separate entity in this context—and win streaks, well, it wasn't. It was also important that each streak tell a story, specifically about a team's playoff fate.
For example, it's all well and good that the Toronto Blue Jays went 22-9 and hit a record 66 home runs in the final month of 2021. But they both started and ended that span in fourth place in the American League East.
As for the 10 streaks that did make the list, let's count them down in order from least compelling story to most compelling story.
Note: All historical playoff odds are according to FanGraphs.
10. 2011 Detroit Tigers
1 of 10
September/October Record: 20-6
Longest Win Streak: 12 games
The Tigers didn't need a hot September to save their 2011 season. They exited August with a 5.5-game lead in the AL Central, and thus with a playoff spot pretty much in hand.
Still, there's never a bad time for the hottest September in franchise history.
The 2011 Tigers indeed own the organization's best ever winning percentage within the final month of a season. And while the club's 12-game win streak between Sep. 2 and Sep. 14 didn't quite put the division race to bed, it ended just two days later on Sep. 16.
Miguel Cabrera capped his pursuit of what would be the first of three straight batting titles in style, hitting .429 on his way to an MLB-high .344 batting average.
And while it was Justin Verlander who would end up winning both the Cy Young Award and the MVP for the American League, Doug Fister actually had the hottest hand in Detroit's rotation at the end. The five appearances he made in September yielded a 0.53 ERA.
In the end, what was a 5.5-game lead at the start of the month ballooned to 15 games. No other team won its division by a larger margin that year.
9. 2022 Atlanta
2 of 10
September/October Record: 21-10
Longest Win Streak: 7 games
Though they held the third-best record in the National League at the time, Atlanta entered September 2022 with a 3.0-game deficit in the NL East.
In case anyone's memory is a little fuzzy just two years later, the New York Mets really were that good through the first five months of the '22 campaign. They were 35 games over .500 and they held a 9-7 advantage in the season series with Atlanta.
These were the odds for the NL East title on the last day of August:
- Mets: 85.0 percent chance of winning
- Atlanta: 15.0 percent chance of winning
The defending World Series champions were, in other words, the underdog. But not for long.
Atlanta followed a win on the last day of August with seven straight to begin September, which was all part of a torrid span in which they won 21 out of 29.
The last three wins were certainly the sweetest, coming by way of a three-game sweep of the Mets at Truist Park. It effectively put Atlanta at the one-yard line for clinching their fifth straight division title, and they got it done two days after finishing off the sweep.
8. 2012 Oakland Athletics
3 of 10
September/October Record: 20-11
Longest Win Streak: 6 games (twice)
Sans context, there's nothing too special about the run the A's went on in September 2012.
That 20-11 record is barely in the top 50 for best September/October performances of the last 14 seasons. And while they did enjoy two separate six-game winning streaks, sandwiched in between was a 14-game span in which they went just 6-8.
But the context in this case is that the A's were nobody's pick to do, well, anything in 2012. After five straight losing seasons, they certainly weren't meant to best the Texas Rangers in the AL West. They were back-to-back champions of both the division and the entire American League.
The Rangers held a 4.0-game lead on the A's as late as Sep. 27, at which point both teams only had six games left. For an upset to happen, the A's needed a surge while the Rangers merely needed to keep from collapsing.
But baseball is funny that way, isn't it?
The seemingly impossible indeed happened by way of the A's winning their last six games, including all three against Texas in Oakland to close out the AL West race. A short while later, even a loss in the ALDS didn't keep the Oakland faithful from letting the team know how they felt with a standing ovation.
.png?w=256)
7. 2022 Cleveland Guardians
4 of 10
September/October Record: 24-10
Longest Win Streak: 7 games
A fun thing about those 2012 A's is how many rookies they relied on in beating expectations. A decade later, though, the Guardians took that model and perfected it.
They debuted 16 rookies by the end of the 2022 season, setting a record for a team that won its division. And in keeping with what we've been talking about, this is yet another division win that was not supposed to happen.
The Guardians began 2022 with a mere 7.5 percent chance of capturing the AL Central title. And even after they had so thoroughly rewritten expectations in the first five months of the season, they were still in a precarious spot.
They entered September with a 1.5-game lead over the Minnesota Twins, and it was gone when a fifth straight loss dropped the Guardians into a tie for first place on Sep. 4. At that point, they were technically the underdog again with a 42.0 percent chance of pulling it off.
Instead, what happened next was a 24-6 run in which the Guardians played eight games against the Twins and won seven of them. They ended up winning the division by an 11-game margin.
Impressive stuff, to be sure. But don't think you've seen the last of Cleveland on this list.
6. 2021 San Francisco Giants
5 of 10
September/October Record: 23-7
Longest Win Streak: 9 games
The Giants stayed closely tethered to first place in the NL West throughout 2021, never leading by more than 5.0 games and never trailing by more than 4.5.
Which was, of course, a surprising development. The Giants had gone into 2021 off four straight losing seasons, and hopes for a better outcome were practically nonexistent. They began '21 with (and this is true) a 0.1 percent chance of winning the NL West.
It was supposed to be the Los Angeles Dodgers' race to lose. And, to their credit, they made the upstart Giants earn it.
Though the Giants went into September with a 0.5-game lead, the Dodgers subsequently tied the race with a win in the second game of a three-game set with the Giants on Sep. 4. Even then, the Giants only had a 24.2 percent chance of beating out their longtime rivals.
Yet it was literally the next day that they started a nine-game win streak, and so it went as they won 21 out of 26 to finish off the season. Every single one of those wins would prove important, as the Giants outlasted the Dodgers by just 1.0 game in the standings.
As catcher Buster Posey so accurately put it: "You're going to be hard-pressed to see another race like this for quite a while."
5. 2018 Milwaukee Brewers
6 of 10
September/October Record: 20-7
Longest Win Streak: 8 games
Even after an 87-76 season in 2017 and an offseason that saw them add Christian Yelich and Lorenzo Cain, the Brewers weren't exactly the favorite to win the NL Central in 2018.
Quite the opposite, in fact. They were seen as having a 2.5 percent chance of ending up on top, which mostly spoke to how much sway the Chicago Cubs (81.4 percent) had in the NL Central at the time.
Whether the Brewers even beat expectations through August was and perhaps still is debatable. Never mind first place. They weren't even in second place, trailing both the Cubs by 4.0 games and the St. Louis Cardinals by 0.5 games.
Yet with three straight wins to close out August, the Brewers had already gotten started on an eventual 22-7 run to close out the regular season proper. It might well have been called The Christian Yelich Show, as the eventual NL MVP drove that stretch with a 1.345 OPS, 11 home runs and 37 runs batted in.
Seven straight wins between Sep. 23 and Sep. 30 took the Brewers from 2.5 games out into a tie for first place with the Cubs. That set up a Game 163 tiebreaker, and the Brewers also won that to put an exclamation mark on their comeback.
4. 2010 Philadelphia Phillies
7 of 10
September/October Record: 23-7
Longest Win Streak: 11 games
In contrast to other teams on this list, the 2010 Phillies weren't supposed to have an especially hard road to the top of their division.
They had won the World Series in 2008 and gone back to the Fall Classic in 2009, and that was before they added Roy Halladay to a starting rotation that already had a strong anchor in Cole Hamels.
The Phillies nonetheless came out of August trailing Atlanta by 3.0 games for the NL East lead, in part because they had failed to take advantage of Atlanta's four-game skid between Aug. 23 and 27. With time winding down, it was a waste of a precious opportunity.
So, the Phillies did what any motivated team would do in their spot. They started September with four wins in a row, to be followed by an even better 11-game win streak between Sep. 12 and Sep, 24. That capped a 27-game span in which they won 23 and lost only four.
Squarely in the middle of all of this was Halladay. He won all five of his decisions in September, with the last coming by way of a two-hit shutout that finally clinched the NL East for the Phillies.
It's nuts to think that wasn't even his best performance of 2010. Or even his second-best performance, for that matter.
3. 2013 Cleveland Guardians
8 of 10
September/October Record: 21-6
Longest Win Streak: 10 games
As I said, you hadn't seen the last of Cleveland on this list. And in the case of the 2013 team, we have arguably an even more impressive underdog story than the 2022 club.
Though the Guardians did try to improve by signing Nick Swisher and Michael Bourn during the 2012-13 offseason, it felt like polishing a you-know-what. They had lost 94 games in 2012, marking their third season out of the last four with at least 90 defeats.
Improvement nonetheless happened initially, as the Guardians were alone in first place as late as July 2. But then regression hit with a 26-26 run through the end of August, at which point they were 8.5 games out of first and staring up at four teams in the AL wild-card race.
But then they won a game on Sep. 1. And then four more between Sep. 3 and Sep. 7. And so on and so on until a 10-game win streak to finish out the year vaulted them into a wild-card spot and ultimately left them just 1.0 game behind the Tigers for the AL Central lead.
Otherwise, it shouldn't be lost to history just how much the 2013 Guardians favored winning games in dramatic fashion. They walked off their opponents 11 times, including twice during that season-ending streak.
2. 2021 St. Louis Cardinals
9 of 10
September/October Record: 23-9
Longest Win Streak: 17 games
The Cubs' 21-game win streak from September 1935 is the third-longest winning streak in MLB history, not to mention the longest within the last month of a season.
The 2021 Cardinals gave it a good run, however. And goodness, did they need it.
Though the Cardinals had begun 2021 with a decent shot at winning the NL Central, by Sep. 10 they were 15.0 games out of first place and out of the money in the NL wild-card race. Anything less than a miracle wasn't going to cut it.
Yet a miracle was what happened, and all it took was a few long balls.
The Cardinals averaged two home runs per game during their 17-game win streak, accounting for the bulk of the third-highest September/October total in history. Paul Goldschmidt went deep seven times during the streak, while Tyler O'Neill hit 13 for the month.
Ultimately, the streak raised the Cardinals' chances of making the playoffs from 5.0 percent up to 100 percent, with the 17th and final win being the one that punched their ticket.
"FanGraphs had us at like a negative 400 percent chance to make the playoffs, and we just proved everyone wrong," said right-hander Adam Wainwright. "We're going to try to keep doing that."
1. 2017 Cleveland Guardians
10 of 10
September/October Record: 26-4
Longest Win Streak: 15 games*
Contrary to the 2013 and 2022 teams, at no point were the 2017 Guardians an underdog.
They began the year with an 87.0 percent chance of winning the AL Central, and those odds ultimately never dipped below 77.7 percent. Even at their lowest point, they were only 3.0 games out of first place on May 27.
They're here, though, because of that asterisk.
That is only counting the consecutive games that the Guardians won in September as part of the 22-game win streak that lasted from Aug. 24 to Sep. 14. It remains the longest winning streak in the history of the American League.
All told, the Guardians won 33 of their last 37 games to close out the 2022 season. And simply by going 26-4 after August, they secured the second-best September/October winning percentage of the live-ball era, which began in 1920.
True, they were going to make the playoffs anyway. But all this effectively made a laugher out of the affair, as Cleveland's 33-4 romp at the end of 2017 grew its lead in the AL Central from 4.5 games to 17.0 games.
Legends? Legends indeed.
Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.
.png?w=480)
.jpg?w=600 "Colts Release Kenny Moore")
