Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week, September 22

After a week off to recharge my batteries — and watch other sports, gasp — it’s time for another installment of five things that caught my eye in baseball this week. Honestly, this list is almost superfluous at this time of year. The standings are so jammed together that half the games in baseball have playoff implications. Teams are getting hot at the right time or collapsing down the stretch in equal measure. Still, you can’t watch everything, so here are some delightful moments you might have missed.

1. Legends, in the Fall
It’s been a rough year for Adam Wainwright. He has put up by far the worst season of his career — a 7.40 ERA says all you really need to know about it — and the Cardinals have collapsed from the perpetual contention he enjoyed for the vast majority of his career. They’ve seemingly played more meaningless games this year than in Wainwright’s entire previous time with the club.

After coming into the year needing only five wins to reach 200 for his career, it looked like Wainwright might miss that milestone. But he got no. 199 in a five-inning, two-run effort on September 12, which left him chasing history at home. Jay Jaffe already covered it, but it was magnificent to see Waino turning back the clock one last time. Whatever “it” is as a pitcher, he has lost it, but he gutted his way through seven scoreless innings anyway to put a cap on a long and storied career.

As a Cardinals fan, I have a lot of memories of Wainwright. Nothing will displace his 2006 playoff run at the front of my mental catalog. I can still picture sitting in my dad’s house in disbelief as we saw him tear his Achilles in 2015. His late-career comeback in 2021 and ’22 was heartwarming. But I’ll save a spot in my head for Monday’s last stand, Wainwright laboring to keep the Brewers off balance just one last time. For most of the year, it looked like his career was headed for an ignominious conclusion, but what a last-second save.

Joey Votto’s season hasn’t gone according to plan either. He’s dealt with a long road back from injuries, amassing only 226 plate appearances and posting one of the worst batting lines of his career. He, too, was an NL Central stalwart for seemingly forever, debuting only two years after Wainwright. But he’s as delightful as ever, and he provides a wonderful juxtaposition to the youthful Reds core as they hang around in the NL playoff race.

I don’t identify with Votto’s on-field feats in the same way I do with Wainwright’s. But as a baseball personality, he’s long been one of my favorites, from the bizarre bus driver fantasy to his tongue-in-cheek fan trolling. He also delivers some of the most thoughtful quotes in the business. If you have a few minutes to spare, listen to him describe his thought process as the season winds down. You won’t be disappointed:

After @ctrent asked him if he's thought about this being his final homestand in Cincinnati, Joey Votto spoke for nearly two minutes. #Reds pic.twitter.com/mvHtQjNxfS

— Joe Danneman (@FOX19Joe) September 19, 2023

2. Regular-Season Series Between Playoff Teams
One of my favorite parts of following September baseball is the dichotomy of matchups. Some teams — your rival team, always — face sleepwalking cupcakes full of players already planning where to take their annual October vacations. Those games are fun because you can see the hunger in one team’s eyes, and they’re also fun when the underdogs flip the script and revel in upsetting the playoff picture. But the other side of the coin is more enjoyable to me: sometimes two playoff-caliber teams face off in an attempt to improve their standing and get a head start on a potential October rematch.

This week, the Orioles and Astros traded blows for three games in a potential ALCS preview. That’s a long way off, though; neither team has clinched their division, and in fact the Astros have two teams lurking only a half-game behind them in the divisional race. They needed these games. The O’s did, too, as they’re trying to hold off the surging Rays.

Monday night’s contest was a seesaw affair. The Orioles led 3–1 before the Astros piled on four runs in the sixth to take a 5–3 lead. Baltimore equalized immediately, only for Houston to tack on two solo homers (José Abreu and Martín Maldonado, both fighting for playing time) to take a 7–5 edge into the ninth. Then Cedric Mullins put his mark on the game:

Cedric Mullins is inevitable. pic.twitter.com/OiA1teAT8w

— Baltimore Orioles (@Orioles) September 19, 2023

This battle felt like it belonged in October, and the teams weren’t done. Tuesday was a laugher, relatively speaking; the Orioles struck early and held on for a 9–5 win. But Wednesday brought another nail-biter. This time, the Orioles held the lead heading into the late innings, but Houston fought back. First, Jeremy Peña opened Houston’s ledger with an RBI double. But Adam Frazier made a dazzling play to keep the game tied:

It’s hard to tell in a GIF that size, but that ball went through Mike Baumann’s legs as it kicked high into the air. Frazier high-pointed it — he’s only 5-foot-10 — and gave the Orioles new life.

Houston wouldn’t be denied, though, with Mauricio Dubón delivering the clinching blow:

High-stakes games between great teams? Players living and dying with every ball or strike? It feels like October already. Getting a taste of that style of baseball in September is a wonderful mid-week pick-me-up.

3. The Marauding Diamondbacks
This week’s Giants-Diamondbacks series doesn’t quite fit with the previous item, because San Francisco’s playoff hopes are fading fast. But that didn’t make this series any less fun to watch, because the Diamondbacks run at every opportunity, which means you never know when their games will go off the rails. With Corbin Carroll leading the charge, Arizona has been one of the most aggressive baserunning teams all year, and the D-Backs are doubling down on it of late.

The Giants’ stately offense got them out to an early lead thanks to a sacrifice fly and a solo home run (okay, fine, LaMonte Wade Jr. hit a triple, but that doesn’t square with my narrative so I’m ignoring it). Then Carroll happened:

Oh, wait, that’s just a standard double down the line, albeit with a fun camera angle. Let’s try this again. The Diamondbacks clung to a narrow 3–2 lead, and then Corbin Carroll happened:

Technically, that’s two errors on a play where Carroll should have been out twice. In reality, it’s so hard to throw him out. He’s outrageously fast. He’s precise. You have to make a great play to get him, and trying to make a great play is a good way to mess up. Even with defensive savant Patrick Bailey on the case, poor Wilmer Flores needed a perfect tag to get Carroll on the first steal attempt, and he couldn’t squeeze the ball and also deliver a clean tag:

Then he had to make a perfect throw under extreme time pressure to stop one of the fastest runners in baseball from scoring, though unfortunately I couldn’t find a good isolated angle of that attempt. Both broadcasts were too focused on Carroll, an understandable state of affairs. He made neither play. We’ve all fallen short of flawless before, though, and anything less isn’t enough to stop Carroll on the basepaths at the moment. Even Arizona third base coach Tony Perezchica thought there wasn’t enough time to score on that play:

That’s not even the play that gave me the most joy in this game, though. The Giants scored two runs in the top of the fifth to make it a 7–4 game. Then Alek Thomas showed that he’s no slowpoke either:

There’s something delightful about watching him get out of the box on that hit. He knows right away that it’ll be a chance for extra bases if it lands, and you can see the moment he started thinking about a triple in his acceleration and route. He was downright flying on the basepaths:

Maybe not everyone loves to watch baserunners at top speed. Maybe MLB is correcting too hard toward the style of baseball that was popular in the 1980s. But watch these Diamondbacks, and you can’t help but have a good time. They’re fast and they know it. It’s up to the rest of the league to throw them out.

4. A Glitch in the Matrix
Do you ever wonder whether we’re living in a simulation? No, I’m not talking about the simulation hypothesis, though grab a drink with me at the Winter Meetings sometime and I’ll be happy to tell you about how I think we might all be digits in a server farm somewhere. I’m thinking of The Matrix, and the occasional deja vu that let the protagonists know that “reality” was a simulation.

Wednesday night in Tampa Bay, reality started skipping and repeating. Not Jimmy Herget, though he’s nicknamed “The Glitch” for a reason:

That pitching motion doesn’t quite look real, I’ll admit. But it is real. Is this, though? With a runner on first, Eduardo Escobar tapped into a double play:

Only, he didn’t. He hit that soft curveball juuuuuuust foul. Isaac Paredes made a smooth play to pick it up, step on the bag, and deliver an accurate throw to second for the tag play. He just happened to field the ball millimeters over the line.

That’s not so weird. But two pitches later, with a runner on first, Eduardo Escobar tapped into a double play:

Only, he didn’t. He hit that soft curveball juuuuuuust foul. Isaac Paredes made a smooth play to pick it up, step on the bag, and deliver an accurate throw to second for the tag play. He just happened to field the ball millimeters over the line.

The 3–6 double play isn’t particularly common in the first place. The ball landing so narrowly foul that the fielders play out the action and the runner slides into second is weird, too. But the same exact play, again, immediately? Maybe the matrix has us.

5. The Little Padres That Could
I almost hesitate to mention it. It’s a longshot, a possibility so remote that even bringing it up might cause it to collapse. Some things are better observed quietly, with no outward acknowledgment that something amazing might be happening, because the probability is so low that saying anything about it feels like a jinx.

The Padres are done. They’re cooked. Ken Rosenthal’s piece detailing their organizational shortcomings is written. We’ve all seen the obituaries for their season, and many of us have tut-tutted at the way they built their team, the hubris of it all, the hilarity of seemingly every pundit picking them to win the NL West when they couldn’t even make it to .500. They were 10 games below .500 — 10!! — on September 12. What a disaster of a season.

They’re three games under .500 now, because they haven’t lost since then. Sure, they’ve mostly played bad teams. They beat the Dodgers in the last of a three-game set, then swept the A’s and Rockies. Those last two series are ones they’re supposed to win. No one is surprised when the two worst teams in baseball each lose three straight.

But here’s another way of looking at it: what if the Padres keep doing it? Their schedule down the stretch isn’t exactly fearsome. They have three with the Cardinals coming up, and while they have been competitive this month, they have the second-worst record in the NL and are resting players liberally. Then San Diego has three against the Giants, who are in the midst of falling apart themselves. And the Padres close out the season with three against the woeful White Sox. They should be favored to win every game left in the season, though obviously being favored in every game isn’t the same as being favored to go undefeated.

Look, they probably won’t manage it. Even if they do, they’re no lock to make the playoffs. Dan Szymborski ran the math today and calculated that they’d only stand a one-in-three shot of snatching the last Wild Card spot even if they won out; they more or less have to go 8-1 just to have a chance. But doesn’t a little part of you want it to happen? Don’t you want to see a team go 16–0 down the stretch to make the playoffs by a single game? Don’t you want all of us baseball talking heads to go from crowning the Padres to condemning them back to talking about them as a feel-good story? The whiplash would be delightful.

When teams maraud to the playoffs like this, it’s always memorable. I still associate the Rockies with their 2007 run, 21 wins in 22 games powering them to an improbable World Series berth (where they promptly got swept, let’s not get carried away). This is the promise of the Padres’ late-season stretch. They probably won’t make it. They almost certainly won’t make it. But hey, a 1% chance at something magical is still worth dreaming about. Spare a glance at the out-of-town scores tonight if you’re watching another game, and every night until San Diego loses. It’s a fun impossibility to dream on. And hey, as we’ve already proved today, we’re living in a simulation. Maybe the fix is already in.