After roughly 150 games played out over the last six months the baseball season is finally starting to wrap up. For many teams this means playing out the string while trying to figure out what sort of talent they have going into next year. For the rest of the league it means an incredibly tense two weeks scrambling and clawing for the wild card spots and one division title that are still up in the air.
The National League playoff picture is a lot clearer than the American League's so we'll start with the Senior Circuit. Barring some sort of miracle the Dodgers and Braves will be playing in October. The magic number* for the Braves is at four and for the Dodgers it is at two. Since mid-July it's been pretty obvious that the Dodgers and Braves were significantly better than the rest of their respective divisions.
Trying to figure out the NL Central is a total mess right now. The Cardinals are one game up on the Pirates with the Reds lurking 2.5 games back. The Cardinals have a pretty cupcake schedule the rest of the way; two more in Colorado followed by three in Milwaukee before returning home for three games against the Nationals and three against the Cubs. While the Nationals will be trying to hang on to their meager playoff chances the Cubs and Brewers were done months ago.
Things get interesting because the Pirates and Reds still have to play each other six more times with a three game showdown in Cincinnati to end the season. Both teams have easy games filling out the schedule (the Pirates get the Padres and Cubs, the Reds get the Astros and the Mets) so the games they play against each other will be key to figuring out if one of them can win the division, or, more likely, which of the two teams will be hosting the one game Wild Card playoff.
There is one more team with playoff aspirations in the National League that we have yet to mention, the Washington Nationals. The Nats started the year with World Series aspirations and instead spent the entire season hovering slightly below .500. Now they find themselves 4.5 games out of the Wild Card spot with only 11 games to go. The good news for the Nats is that they get to play league doormat Florida for four games at home. The bad news is that they need to travel to St. Louis and Arizona to finish off the season.
If the Nats can come close to running the table they could have a chance at making one of the two Wild Card spots; any loss will severely hurt their chances, two or more losses and they're done.
* The magic number is a combination of wins by the leading team (ex. the Braves) and/or losses by the closest opposing team (ex. the Nationals). Once it hits zero the leading team has won the division.
** Standings and statistics used in this article were taken from MLB.com.
