The Opener

1. The Blue Jays won the AL East. The Guardians won the AL Central.
2. The Reds and Mets both lost, so the Reds made the postseason as the National League’s final Wild Card team.
3. The Wild Card series, which begin Tuesday and run up to three straight days at the top seed’s park, are thus: Red Sox at Yankees, Tigers at Guardians, Padres at Cubs, Reds at Dodgers.

On Saturday I found myself watching baseball with my parents and my youngest brother. Growing up, he didn’t care about sports at all but sometime between when I left for college and now he’s become the kind of fan who speaks in the first person plural about the Eagles and says things like “it’s a shame Max Kepler isn’t better because he’d be a great addition to the himbo core of the Phillies” and then when my mom says “the what?” he says “himbos! It was a storyline like three years ago? Don’t worry about it.”

Anyway, if you read our Friday issue you know there were still races yet decided when the weekend began. The NL East was not one of them. The Phillies entered the final series of the season with a cushy 13 game lead and a bye locked up. The Mets — and a handful of other teams, but my mom is a Mets fan — meanwhile, were playing to keep their postseason hopes alive.

At my parents’ house in south Jersey, the Phillies game was on.

“Can we put the Mets game on?” my mom said more firmly than I’ve heard her be about TV since she was telling us to turn it off two decades ago.

“Yeah, why are we watching a meaningless game?” I said probably a little petulantly because people are prone to that kind of regression.

My brother explained that it was not, in fact, meaningless. The Phillies needed to stay ahead of the Toronto Blue Jays’ record. “They’re in the AL.” I said. “It’s for homefield advantage in the World Series!” He said.

Sometimes it’s good to be reminded of how the vast majority of people consume sports: through the passionate, narrow lens of a single team’s fortunes.

But before we start the annual winnowing of our focus, one more regular season bits and bobs to commemorate what was a fantastic final weekend of 30-team baseball.

— Hannah Keyser

The Bullpen

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The Guardians freaking did it: completing the biggest comeback in baseball history. On July 8th, they were in fourth place — closer in record to the cellar-dwelling White Sox than the AL Central-leading Tigers. But even much more recently, in early September, they still trailed the division by 11 games. Then they went 20-7 this month while the Tigers spiraled nearly out of the playoff picture entirely.

As a team, Cleveland scored the third-fewest runs in MLB this season. In fact, despite being much better at preventing runs, they’ve scored fewer than they’ve allowed. They only have two regular players with above league average offense (and, actually, Steven Kwan is not one of them even though he’s the second guy you’ve heard of).

And so it seemed fitting that on Saturday they clinched a playoff spot after a walk-off hit-by-pitch. But they managed more fireworks for the division clinch — walking off game 162 with a 10th-inning, three-run home run by Brayan Rocchio.

Really good use of field view. –HK

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The second most hype moment of the Games 162 might have come in the Blue Jays’ AL East-clinching victory over the Rays, when Alejandro Kirk blasted a grand slam to send Toronto into party mode.

This is the first time Toronto has earned a bye in the expanded postseason format, and that buffer adds to the validation of the Blue Jays’ season. They signed Vladimir Guerrero Jr. They got a big year from Bo Bichette (even if his injury might keep him out of the postseason). They went for it, proving one idiot wrong, and it will result in at least one banner and some frenzied home games at the Rogers Centre. —ZC

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Contrary to how it sometimes seems, this is not a Mets newsletter, so we shouldn’t spend an undue amount of words marveling at how they missed the postseason entirely after ascending to be the best team in baseball in mid-June.

But, in summation: