MLB: A quick look at the NL Wild Card race
By Jason Burke
For much of the season the Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies have been out in front of the NL Wild card race, but with both teams slumping of late could another team actually slip by?
Entering play on Saturday, the Colorado Rockies (68-54) and Arizona Diamondbacks (67-55) hold both of the NL Wild Card spots with the Rockies having a one game lead over the D-Backs for the first spot, and therefore home field advantage for the play-in game.
However, both teams have been struggling to pile up wins of late with Colorado going 4-6 in their last ten and Arizona at an even worse 3-7. There are really only two teams that could theoretically catch either the Rockies or Diamondbacks, and one of them, the Milwaukee Brewers, is 4-6 in their last ten as well. They dropped Friday’s series opener with the Rockies in Colorado but will have two more games to try and trim their 4.5 game deficit to 2.5 by the end of the weekend.
More from Call to the Pen
- Philadelphia Phillies, ready for a stretch run, bomb St. Louis Cardinals
- Philadelphia Phillies: The 4 players on the franchise’s Mount Rushmore
- Boston Red Sox fans should be upset over Mookie Betts’ comment
- Analyzing the Boston Red Sox trade for Dave Henderson and Spike Owen
- 2023 MLB postseason likely to have a strange look without Yankees, Red Sox, Cardinals
The other team with a legitimate shot in the race is the St. Louis Cardinals, who are 7-3 in their last ten and 20-14 (.588) since the break. This includes an eight game win streak over the Reds, Royals and Braves that ended last week.
While the focus for both the Cardinals and the Brewers is almost certainly the NL Central where the Chicago Cubs hold a 1.5 game lead over St. Louis and a two game lead over Milwaukee, at least one of those three teams is ultimately going to find themselves hoping for a Wild Card berth at some point in the near future.
What makes all of this more interesting is that all five of these teams reside within two divisions, meaning they’ll be beating up on each other more often than not over the course of the final month and that should create space for teams to sneak ahead on a daily basis.
The Rockies and Diamondbacks have the easier slate of divisional games up ahead with the Giants and Padres combined record of 104-142 being worse than the Pirates and Reds’ 110-135 combined record. Even with that, they’ll still have to face the Dodgers, a club that has the best record in baseball by twelve games.
This is one area that the Diamondbacks have a clear leg up on the Rockies. Arizona has six remaining games against Los Angeles, three at home at the end of August and three in L.A. at the beginning of September. The Rockies have seven games left against the Dodgers, four in L.A., where the Dodgers have a .784 winning percentage this season and then three more in Colorado to close out the season. The Dodgers could be resting players by the time that final series comes around, but it’s best not to count on such things happening.
However this ends up playing out, it sure looks destined to be a more exciting race than we had in mind around the All Star break.