MLB Wild Card Race: The 10 Biggest Chokes of the Wild Card Era

A quick disclaimer-cum-introduction:

Boston Red Sox and Atlanta Braves fans may want to avert their eyes.

This is indeed a list of the worst team chokes in the history of Major League Baseball’s Wild Card era.  Your teams are on this list, with a bullet.

If you want, skip the final two slides and save them for some other, future rainy day.

Or maybe you’ll want to read this list now, to heap misery upon misery, to know that you’re not alone in the suffering.

Trust me, others suffered before you. That sinking feeling is a familiar one.

1995 California Angels

According to stat whiz Nate Silver the chances of the Angels missing the 1995 playoffs on August 20th of that year were 8,332-to-1, making it the most mathematically improbable choke in major league history.

On that date the Angels led the AL West by 9.5 games over a middling Texas Rangers team, held a 12-game advantage over eventual Wild Card winner New York Yankees and a 12.5 game lead on the third place Seattle Mariners.

The Angels went 12-26 down the stretch, including two separate nine-game losing streaks, while both the Mariners and Yankees each went 26-13 to set up a one-game playoff between the Mariners and Angels for the AL West crown.

The Angels lost 9-1 in a game that captured the essence of their stretch-run misery.

Tellingly awful statistic: By season’s end the Angels didn’t have a single starting pitcher with an ERA below 4, a stat made possible by staff ERAs above 5 in each of the final two months.

1999 Cincinnati Reds

A mini-choke is still a choke after all.

That’s what Cincinnati Reds fans learned in 1999, when their team lost three consecutive games heading into the last day of the season. Jack McKeon’s group—yes, he was already a grizzled veteran by then—then bounced back to win 7-1 in the season finale to force a one-game playoff with the Mets.

Then they lost again, 5-0 on a complete-game shutout by Al Leiter.

Now I should note that the ‘99 Reds won six consecutive games before their three-game mini-choke and would not have been in position to choke had they not gone 19-9 in a stellar September.

Still, you’ve got to win ‘em when they count. The Reds didn’t.

Tellingly awful statistic: The three-game losing streak was tied for the longest of Cincinnati’s season.

2002 Seattle Mariners

Fans better remember the 2002 AL West for its fantastic successes rather than its failures.

From August 13th to September 4th, the Oakland Athletics won an AL-record 20 straight games on their way to a second division title in three seasons. Division rivals Anaheim also qualified for the playoff as the Wild Card,  the last AL West team to win that honor, and ended up as World Series champions.

Few recall that the Seattle Mariners actually led the division fairly late in the year.

On August 12th the Mariners held a 3.5 game lead on the Angels and four game lead on the Athletics. Those aren’t astounding cushions, but a little context makes the matter pretty compelling.

Back to August 12th.

On that date the Mariners were 72-45. If you combine their 2002 record to that point with their record-breaking 2001mark, the franchise had played .674 baseball over the course of 279 games. Pretty amazing.

They then went 21-24 over the season’s final 45 games. It’s hard to explain a team so talented turning in such an extended period of mediocre baseball.

The Mariners haven’t qualified for the playoffs since.

Tellingly awful statistic: Seattle’s starting rotation had a 5.10 ERA in August, low-lighted by James Baldwin’s 14.81 ERA in two starts. Should have stuck to writing.

2007 San Diego Padres

Another race remembered more as a comeback than a collapse, the Padres led the Colorado Rockies by five games in the Wild Card with 13 games remaining in 2007.

The Padres idled at 7-6 the rest of the way while the Rockies closed at a torrid 12-1 clip.

7-6 isn’t a choke, right? Trust me, we’re getting there.

The Padres would have won the Wild Card outright if not for a two-out triple in the bottom of the ninth by Brewers reserve Tony Gwynn Jr. Gwynn hit off closer Trevor Hoffman in the second-to-last game of the year that eventually led to a 4-3 defeat.

Another loss by the Padres on the final day of the season opened the door for a one-game playoff. In the playoff game game, the Padres held another late lead, this one a two-run cushion going into the bottom of the 13th. The Rockies responded with three runs, the third coming on a controversial call by home plate umpire Tim McClelland, to earn an improbable 9-8 win.

The Rockies would rumble to the franchise’s first World Series appearance while Padres still search for their first postseason berth since 2006.

Tellingly awful statistic: On the heals of seven scoreless appearances, Trevor Hoffman allowed four earned runs over the last 1.1 innings of the 2007 season.

2007 New York Mets

Here it is, the grandaddy of all Wild Card era collapses.

Or at least it was until yesterday.

Off-field drama, acute failure, regional rivalry; this meltdown had it all.

With 17 games left the New York Metropolitans looked like a lock for their second-consecutive NL East crown. They held a seven game lead on the second-place Philadelphia Phillies and had fans looking forward to another crack at the NL pennant.

Then the fall.

New York dropped three games at home to the Phillies and brash leader Jimmy Rollins, who had famously declared Philadelphia the “team to beat” in Spring Training.

The Mets then lost nine of their final 14 games, punctuated by a crushing 8-1 defeat to the Marlins on the season’s final day as the division title hung in the balance.

In that game future hall of famer Tom Glavine didn’t make it out of the first inning. The darkly comic undertone of Mets baseball never felt so fitting or fulfilled.

Tellingly awful statistic: The Mets allowed six or more runs in eight of their last 13 games.

2008 New York Mets

Their 2007 fade gets most of the ink, but another Mets collapse the very next season rivals the standard bearer.

Up once more on the Phillies, this time 3.5 games with 17 contests remaining, the Mets went 7-10 down the stretch and finished three games behind Philadelphia in the NL East. To add insult, the Phillies romped through the playoffs en route to the city’s first major sports championship in 26 years.

And unlike the 2007 collapse the 2008 one was truly final. Since 2008 the Mets haven’t finished better than fourth in the NL East.

Their season-ending tilt with the Florida Marlins was also their last game at Shea Stadium. Of course, they left the ballpark the same way they christened it, with a lost.

Tellingly awful statistic: Lefty Oliver Perez posted a 5.79 ERA over his last six starts and hasn’t pitched more than 66 innings in a major league season since.

2009 Detroit Tigers

The Detroit Tigers 2009 choke was really two chokes,  a primary and secondary choke rolled into one dreadful month.

The secondary choke was a slow burn in which a seven-game Detroit lead on September 6th dwindled to just two over the course of 13 days.

After that things stabilized, and the Tigers headed into the final four games of the season with a fairly safe three-game cushion.

Then came the primary choke, a four-game stretch where the second-place Minnesota Twins won every game they played and the Tigers went 1-3. The convocation of reversing fates set the stage for a one-game playoff where the Tigers choked once more, blowing an early 3-0 lead and a 5-4 10th inning lead to eventually lose 6-5 in the 12th.

Tellingly awful statistic: Over the final four games of the regular season, before the one-game playoff, the Tigers were outscored 24-9.

2010 San Diego Padres

San Diego’s choke job gets overlooked because no one expected the 2010 Padres to contend in the first place. They were a pleasant surprise that took a predictable September swoon.

But I don’t care if you're the Bad News Bears, if you swoon this hard it merits mention.

The Padres led the San Francisco Giants by six games on August 27th. Four days later, despite the fact they weren’t even playing one another, the Padres lead was down to just three.

It was the start of a 14-21 run that buried the upstart Padres and propelled San Francisco toward their first World Series title in over 50 years, a run punctuated by a 3-0 loss to the Giants on the season's final day.

To give a sense of how little people expected from the Padres that year, skipper Bud Black still won NL Manager of the Year honors after the collapse.

Tellingly awful statistic: The Padres had a team on base percentage under .300 during September and October.

2011 Atlanta Braves

The humiliation that has been the final 19 games of Atlanta’s season took an even more shameful turn in the season’s final series. Playing at home against the rival Philadelphia Phillies, Atlanta dropped the first two games by a combined score of 11-3.

They then lost the final game, last night, in the 13th inning after carrying a 3-2 cushion into the ninth inning. In a most improbable turn it was the Braves' vaunted bullpen, and rookie sensation Craig Kimbrel, who could not finish the job.

What’s worse the Phillies had nothing to gain from rubbing Atlanta’s misfortune in their face. They just like it.

For the longest time this looked like a stepping season for an emerging Braves team. On September 6th they held an 82-59 record and an 8.5 game wild card lead over the St. Louis Cardinals.

Injuries and an anemic offense precipitated a 5-12 stretch that has a once-promising team looking more like they're running in place. And the stockyard of young pitching that seemed to ensure the Braves against implosion? It never really showed.

Tellingly awful statistic: Derek Lowe, he of the $15 million salary, allowed three earned runs or more in each of his last five starts.

2011 Boston Red Sox

The dry numbers don’t do this collapse service.

That’s not to say that the complete evaporation of a nine-game lead over the course of 22 days in September isn’t spectacularly atrocious. It is.

It’s just that there’s something more at play here, the kind of back story that makes this particular choke so wildly compelling.

The small-market Rays lost a handful of their best players this past offseason, the best of which signed with these Boston Red Sox for $142 million. They were given somewhere between “no” and “little” chance to even contend for a playoff spot this year.

The Red Sox had the most ballyhooed winter in franchise history and entered the year with more hype than any of the franchise’s previous 110 teams.

This year’s incantation of Red Sox versus Rays was like the battle of David versus Goliath with added elements of Julius Caesar and King Midas throw in for added suspense.

On Wednesday that trio of story lines combined with a “Gone in 60 Seconds” late-night twist to cement the Red Sox  painful fate, as the Red Sox blew a lead mere moments before Evan Longoria’s walk-off shot sent Tampa Bay past New York and into the 2010 AL Playoffs.

It was, and is, Tampa’s first Wild Card lead in the second half of the season.

You can’t write a better script, and thanks to Wild Card baseball you don’t have to.

Tellingly awful statistic: The Red Sox lost each of Jon Lester’s final four starts. That’s only happened one other time in Lester’s career, from July 18th to August 4th, 2010.

Still More Chokes...

Sports Illustrated's Cliff Corcoran helped fill in the gaps of my memory with a keen bit of statistical research. He calculated the most unlikely collapses in baseball history using mathematical odds borrowed from baseball statistician Clay Davenport and superstar stat freak Nate Silver. A couple from the Wild Card era that I hadn't recalled popped up. They were...

- The 2003 Mariners (had a 97.91 percent chance of advancing on June 18th)

-The 2005 Indians (had a 96.5 percent chance of advancing on September 24th)

-The 2002 Red Sox (had a 95.84 percent chance of advancing on June 6th)