You wake up thinking of magic numbers. You check the scoreboard like you’re waiting for an appointment. You are waiting for something, though. This weekend, it was good news from Minnesota.
It’s Monday morning, Sept. 22, and the Boston Red Sox have six games left in the regular season. They are one game ahead of the Houston Astros and Cleveland Guardians for the final wild card spot in the American League playoffs.
Meanwhile, Cleveland sits a game behind the Detroit Tigers for first place in the AL Central, and begins a three-game series at home against Detroit on Tuesday. This pennant race has more subplots than a hacky soap opera.
The Guardians shoved the Texas Rangers out of the way last week. Cleveland’s 10-game winning streak ended Sunday against the Twins, and Houston lost to the Mariners, but the Red Sox couldn’t capitalize and dropped a game against the Rays.
Boston’s slim lead is just one in the loss column, which is where all baseball hopes and dreams live. The win column is hopeful potential. The loss column is cruel resignation.
Because the Red Sox win a tiebreaker against either the Guardians or Astros, Boston’s magic number going into these final six games is five. That’s the combination of Red Sox wins and Guardians or Astros losses it will take for the math to stop working for either. In Houston, fans are likely fine with turning the page to football season. In Cleveland, even with Sunday’s last-second win over the Green Bay Packers, it’s not such a favorable proposition.
This race has been tight for a while. You sip coffee and study each morning like you’re prepping for the LSATs. You try to figure out how Cleveland is doing it. Even with the hot streak, the Guardians have allowed nine more runs than they’ve scored. Cleveland is the only team in the majors with a winning record that has surrendered more runs than it has scored.
This paradox calls for another cup of coffee.
On Saturday, Kyle Harrison, one of the broken puzzle pieces the Red Sox got in return for Rafael Devers, made his first start for the Red Sox. Harrison was good, and the Red Sox played three runs in the top of the ninth for the win. In Minneapolis, the Guardians kept winning.
On Sunday, knowing Cleveland and Houston had already lost, rookie Connelly Early, who a couple months ago was pitching in Portland, had a typically rookie hiccup start and the Red Sox failed to capitalize.
You take another sip of coffee and promise yourself you will not allow baseball game outcomes to ruin your day. It’s a promise you’re not sure you can keep.
You hope the upcoming week conjures memories of Tom Brunansky’s sliding catch into the right-field wall to beat the White Sox and send the Red Sox to the 1990 playoffs. The ensuing series against the Oakland A’s is a blur best forgotten, but that catch by Brunansky, who nobody ever described as nimble, is immortal.
Or maybe it will spark memories of 2021, when Devers hit a home run on a Sunday afternoon in Washington, D.C., to clinch a wild-card spot. You absolutely do not want to be reminded of 2011, when the Red Sox sputtered through September like a Pinto and saw playoff hopes evaporate with a walkoff loss in Baltimore in the final minutes of the regular season.
At the same time the Chicken and Beer Sox were getting a tight grasp on infamy in Baltimore, the Tampa Bay Rays were walking off the Yankees, stealing a playoff spot away from the Red Sox.
A lot of younger fans don’t have the institutional memory of playoff races. They have neither the angels nor demons. This upcoming week is their first foray into all of this. Us older fans had to watch the crawl on the bottom of the television screen to get those important out-of-town scores, or even wait until the next morning when the local paper had the updated standings and boxscores in print.
These young fans have those answers in their hands in seconds, on phone screens. The pennant race now moves at the speed of a WiFi connection.
Ignore the chill in the air. This week, hour by hour, inning by inning, pitch by pitch, the Red Sox are playing meaningful baseball. They can extend summer, or they can make your mental leaves change.
