This is the fourth installment of this year’s Team Entropy series, my recurring look not only at the races for the remaining playoff spots but the potential for end-of-season chaos in the form of down-to-the-wire suspense and even tiebreakers. Ideally, we want more ties than the men’s department at Macy’s. If you’re new to this, please read the introduction here.

The past couple of days have been very, very good ones for Team Entropy, at least in the NL (all five playoff teams in the AL have been determined). With the Cubs (now 91-66) losing back-to-back games to the Pirates while the Brewers (91-67) beat the Cardinals (87-71) twice, the top two teams in the NL Central are separated by just half a game heading into Wednesday evening. The two losses have dropped the Cardinals half a game behind the Rockies (87-70) in the race for the second NL Wild Card spot, while the resilient Rox, who have won five straight since being swept by the Dodgers (88-70) last week, are just half a game out of first place in the NL West. Five teams fighting for four playoff spots in three races, separated by three half-game margins. It’s that simple — and that complex.

The half-game stuff will resolve itself one way or another on Thursday, when the Cubs and Rockies both play (the last of a four-game set against the Pirates for the former, the first of a four-gamer against the Phillies for the latter) while the Cardinals and Dodgers are idle. After that, every team will have three games remaining, with the Cubs hosting the Cardinals, the Rockies hosting the Nationals, the Brewers hosting the Tigers, and the Dodgers visiting the Giants.

The current iteration of our playoff odds ties page shows a 23.9% chance of a tie in the NL Central after 162 games, with a 19.8% chance of a tie in the West and a 26.4% chance of a tie in the Wild Card race. Given all of that, it’s worth a quick review of how this works, but let’s start with the latest iteration of my Big Board, showing the head-to-head records of the relevant teams.

Let’s start with the NL West, where things are relatively simple. If the Dodgers and Rockies wind up tied after 162 games, the two teams would play a tiebreaker at Dodger Stadium on Monday, October 1, on the basis of Los Angeles’ 12-7 season series advantage. The winner would be the division champion, the loser a potential Wild Card team, with that Game 163 result having no impact in such a determination.

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This season can’t end soon enough for the Orioles, whose 111 losses match the 2004 Diamondbacks and 2013 Astros for the most defeats by any team since the Tigers lost 119 in 2003. While Tuesday night’s postponed game against the Red Sox — one that carries no implications for the playoffs, given that the Boston has clinched the league’s best record — will be made up as part of a day/night doubleheader at Fenway Park on Wednesday, the least that we can hope for is that Chris Davis‘ season is done.

You may recall that Davis, the all-or-nothing slugging first baseman who has belted as many as 53 homers in a season (2013) and struck out as many as 219 times (2016), got off to such a dreadful start that on June 15, I wrote that he might be having the worst season ever, at least as far as FanGraphs’ measurements go. Through the Orioles’ first 67 games (of which he had played 57), he had “hit” .150/.227/.227 for a 24 wRC+ and “produced” -1.9 WAR, putting him on pace for somewhere between -4.6 and -4.7 over a 162-game season, depending on the rounding — lower than any player in the annals.

The same day that my piece was published, the Orioles announced that they had benched Davis — who at that point hadn’t actually played since June 11 — indefinitely in an effort to pull him out of his slide. He ended up sitting for eight games, and homered in the second plate appearance of his return, off the Braves’ Sean Newcomb on June 22. The gambit worked, in that he generally wasn’t as bad after the benching as before; in fact, he rarely scraped bottom to the same degree:

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On Sunday, the Rockies shut out the Diamondbacks 2-0, thus completing a three-game sweep in Arizona that put the home team out of its misery as far as the 2018 season is concerned. The Diamondbacks spent 125 days with at least a share of first place in the NL West this year, more than any other team, and when they weren’t in first they were at least in Wild Card contention. And then the calendar flipped to September, and they made like Wile E. Coyote:

From August 31 to September 23, the Diamondbacks lost 17 out of 22 games — that’s a half-game worse than the Orioles, who have already lost 111 games overall — producing a playoff odds graph that, as I suggested last week, looks more like the sharp spires of Utah’s Bryce Canyon than the signature expanses of Arizona’s Grand Canyon. (As a Utah native who has never hiked the latter, I may be biased here.)

Anyway, ouch. The collapse has to rate as one of the more gruesome in recent history, though it isn’t as though the team frittered away a seemingly insurmountable lead or was a powerhouse to begin with. The Diamondbacks’ largest lead in the NL West was six games, and that was as of May 1, when they had just beaten the Dodgers for the second straight night to open a four-game series and climbed to an NL-best 21-8. They have the NL’s fifth-worst record since then, despite outscoring the opposition:

That May 1 win was just one of eight the Diamondbacks notched that month en route to an 8-19 record. They rebounded to go 19-9 in June, but spent the next two months meandering around .500, going 13-13 in July and 14-12 in August. Even so, they were in either first or second place in the NL West for all but one day of that two-month span of mediocrity.

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This is the third installment of this year’s Team Entropy series, my recurring look not only at the races for the remaining playoff spots but the potential for end-of-season chaos in the form of down-to-the-wire suspense and even tiebreakers. Ideally, we want more ties than the men’s department at Macy’s. If you’re new to this, please read the introduction here.

For those still on the Team Entropy bandwagon, the massive tiebreaker scenarios for which we’ve been hoping are starting to feel like the Great Pumpkin. Some of us still have our blankets and aren’t yet ready to go home, but others have moved on to the candy and costumes.

The penultimate weekend is one that features a lot of scoreboard watching, as there’s not much at stake when it comes to head-to-head action. With apologies to the Phillies (1.2% playoff odds) and Diamondbacks (0.5%), we’re down to six contenders for five spots in the NL. The D-backs, who have lost 14 of their last 19 games to produce an odds graph that more resembles Utah’s Bryce Canyon than Arizona’s Grand Canyon, will still have some say in the playoff picture, as they host the reeling Rockies — the team with the most at stake in both the division and Wild Card races — for a three-game set starting on Friday night. The Rockies (82-70) were just swept by the Dodgers and have lost five out of six to fall 2.5 games back in the division race, the furthest they’ve been since August 10; our odds put them at 4.3% in that context. They’re 1.5 games behind the Cardinals (84-69) in the race for the second NL Wild Card spot, with odds of just 21.1% there. They’re hoping to get Trevor Story, who left Monday night’s game with an elbow injury that was initially feared to be UCL related, back sometime this weekend, which could provide an emotional lift, but as we’ve already estimated the 25-year-old shortstop to claim about 80% of the remaining playing time at the position, that isn’t going to move the needle, odds-wise.

As for the teams that the Rockies are pursuing, the Dodgers (85-68), who have their largest division lead of the season, host the Padres. The defending NL champions now have a 95.6% chance at capturing their sixth straight division title. The Cardinals (84-69), who host the Giants, have a 76.0% chance at claiming that a Wild Card spot (more on the Central race momentarily).

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In addition to forestalling the Red Sox’ attempt to clinch an AL East title on the Yankees’ turf, Neil Walker’s three-run shot off the Boston’s Ryan Brasier on Tuesday night gave New York a share of one major-league record. Wednesday night’s pair of homers from Luke Voit and another from Miguel Andujar gave the club a share of a franchise record and inched them closer to two more major-league ones. In these homer-happy times, nobody loves the long ball as much as the Bronx Bombers.

Walker’s homer, a towering, second-deck blast to right field, was his 10th of the season.

That gave the Yankees 11 players in double digits, tying a mark that has been matched in each of the past four years, a period that admittedly has produced three of the four highest per-game home run rates in history (1.26 per team per game in 2017, 1.16 in 2016, and 1.15 this year).

This year’s Blue Jays could join the above 11×10 list if rookie Lourdes Gurriel Jr. hits two more homers over the remainder of the season, while the Yankees similarly have a shot at separating themselves from this pack if Voit, who didn’t even debut with the team until August 2, adds one more. Voit’s homers on Wednesday night, which were less majestic than Walker’s, represented his eighth and ninth since joining the team.

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This article has been updated since initial publication to reflect developments in the diagnosis of Trevor Story’s right elbow.

Surrendering first place to the Dodgers, as the Rockies did on Monday night in Los Angeles, was bad enough. The departure of Trevor Story in the middle of his fourth-inning plate appearance may prove more damaging to the team’s postseason hopes. Via Twitter, The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal reported on Tuesday afternoon that the All-Star shortstop is “facing potential UCL damage in [his] right elbow,” though the exact diagnosis was unknown at the time. In the wake of an MRI, the Rockies now believe that Story is dealing with inflammation in the elbow but no structural damage to the ligament. Had there been significant UCL damage, the 25-year-old shortstop would likely have been headed for Tommy John surgery, ruling him out of the remainder of the regular season and postseason (if the Rockies make it), and into the first half of next season. The Rockies are optimistic that he will miss “only a few days,” though his absence could potentially be a significant blow to the team’s playoff hopes.

Story reportedly felt a twinge in his elbow after making an outstanding play in the first inning on Monday night. He dove to his left to stop a Justin Turner grounder, then he completed a spin and made a strong throw to first base for the out. His discomfort worsened when he whiffed on a 2-1 Hyun-Jin Ryu changeup in his next plate appearance.

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Yasiel Puig can still provide a spark or two of electricity when needed. In fact, the 27-year-old right fielder put forth quite a jolt this past weekend, doing some of the best work of his career in two of the Dodgers’ biggest wins this season. On Friday night in St. Louis, he punctuated a taut pitchers’ duel between Walker Buehler and Jack Flaherty with a pair of solo homers that bookended the scoring in a 3-0 victory. On Saturday afternoon, he hit three more jacks, two of them of the three-run variety, in a 17-4 rout. The wins allowed the Dodgers to catch and overtake both the Cardinals in the NL Wild Card race and the Rockies in the NL West race, and while Sunday’s loss to St. Louis undid both, Puig and company beat the Rockies on Monday night to retake the division lead.

You like dingers? Of course you do. Here’s the supercut of Puig’s five, which came at the expense of Flaherty, Tyler Webb (no, not that guy), John Gant, Mike Mayers and Luke Weaver:

It remains to be seen how the Dodgers’ season ends up, but as Puig goes, the 2018 campaign has been a fairly calm one, largely devoid of the drama of years past. Fewer complaints about his overly aggressive baserunning or lack of interest in the cut-off man. No reports of tardiness. No teammates ripping him anonymously through the media. No benchings or trips to the minors. He did get suspended for two games last month for brawling with the Giants’ Nick Hundley — an episode which brought forth the usual performative pomposity from the pastime’s moral guardians — but that has been the exception this season, not the rule.

He’s still demonstrative, of course, showing off his tongue now and then, licking his bat, admiring his homers when he hits them, and even kissing hitting coach Turner Ward afterwards. The epic bat flips, and the controversies attached to them — to his, specifically, not to the inane culture war that surrounds bat flips in general — appear to be a thing of the past.

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This is the second installment of this year’s Team Entropy series, my recurring look not only at the races for the remaining playoff spots but the potential for end-of-season chaos in the form of down-to-the-wire suspense and even tiebreakers. Ideally, we want more ties than the men’s department at Macy’s. If you’re new to this, please read the introduction here.

Look, it hasn’t been a great week and a half for the Team Entropy bandwagon, but part of this job is staring a distinct lack of chaos in the face and acknowledging that fact. As of Labor Day (September 3), the National League featured eight teams with playoff chances of at least 25.6%. Ten days’ worth of games later, the lowest of those teams at the time, the Diamondbacks, is down to 3.2%, but they’re not even the ones who have fallen the furthest. The Phillies, losers of six out of eight since then, and 22 of their last 32 overall, are down to a 2.9% chance, a drop of 27.2 points since Labor Day. They’re now below the odds of the Mariners in the AL (5.7%) at the time, which I totally waved off.

Here’s a quick comparison of those eight NL teams since Labor Day:

The aforementioned two teams bore the brunt of the losses, but the Dodgers also took a substantial kick to the stomach. Their odds of winning the NL West dropped from 70.8% to 55.5%, while their odds of claiming a Wild Card spot climbed only from 13.1% to 19.4%. They still have the highest probability of winning the World Series of any NL team (13.6%, down from 16.3%), but I’ll wager that the machine running these odds hasn’t sat through their late-inning bullpen mess recently.

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When the Mariners’ James Paxton completed his no-hitter against the Blue Jays on May 8, it was the majors’ second in a five-day span. The Dodgers’ Walker Buehler and three relievers had performed the same feat versus the Padres on May 4. It was also the third in 18 days, if we include the A’s Sean Manaea performance against the Red Sox on April 21. We haven’t seen one since, though we’ve certainly seen no shortage of credible bids, including three that made it into the ninth inning, the most recent of which was this past Saturday (care of the Royals’ Jorge Lopez against the Twins). On Wednesday night, the Twins’ own Jake Odorizzi was the latest to give it a go, holding the Yankees hitless for 7.1 innings before yielding an RBI double to Greg Bird.

The hit came on Odorizzi’s 120th pitch, matching a career high set on June 3, 2016, which suggests that he likely wouldn’t have finished the job even if he’d retired Bird. That said, it sounds as though manager Paul Molitor had given him the green light. Via The Athletic’s Dan Hayes:

“I told him, ‘This is one of those rare nights when you get in this type of area,’ in terms of doing something that was magical,” Molitor said. “You just try to do the best you can and trust that he was going to make a good decision for himself and not get too caught up. Sometimes you have to do that for him, but I thought he was in a good place.”

Odorizzi had begun running up his pitch count in the first inning, when he threw 23 pitches via three-ball counts against both Andrew McCutchen and Miguel Andujar sandwiched around an Aaron Hicks plate appearances that featured five straight foul balls. He walked three batters in all. Only in the seventh inning, when he needed just seven pitches to retire Andujar, Giancarlo Stanton and Didi Gregorius, did he throw fewer than 14 pitches.

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