UPDATED AFTER 9/23
…or close the wall up with our Philadelphia dead.
There is just one more week left in the Phillies regular season. The Magic Number is 2 with the Arizona Diamondbacks 3 games back with 4 games to play and no tiebreak to fall back on. Of course, the Chicago Cubs and San Diego Padres are still in this thing too. San Diego is a full game ahead but while the Cubs crushed us this season, we swept the Padres. What happens in a 3 way tie? Add up all the head to heads. The Cubs would be the winner thanks to going 5-1 against the Padres and 6-1 against the Phillies.
What’s at stake? WC1 and WC2 play each other while WC3 likely plays the Braves. These will be 3 game series with only WC1 playing at home. Let’s take a look around…
Phillies
Honestly, a split in NY wasn’t that bad considering the house of horrors it has been for us lately. It just stinks how the losses happened, with Brooks Raley and Orion Kerkering putting Friday and Saturday out of reach. The bullpen is basically Jhoan Duran, Alex McFarlane, and…Jose Alvarado??? That’s it. Of course, that ignores the 7 scoreless innings pitched by the resurgent Aaron Nola who is throwing his best since his magical 2018 season. He is probably your Game 3 playoff starter at this point with Jesus Luzardo becoming the bridge from the starters to Duran.1
Of course, we still have to get there. This week we have the leaders of both leagues coming to Philadelphia, the Brewers and Rays:
Milwaukee Brewers:
Citizen’s Bank Park – Philadelphia, PA
Tuesday, September 22 at 6:40p – Zack Wheeler vs Dustin May (R)
Wednesday, September 23 at 6:40p – Aaron Nola vs Logan Henderson (R)
Thursday, September 24 at 6:05p – Andrew Painter vs Bullpen2
Tampa Bay Rays:
Friday, September 25 at 6:40p – Bullpen vs Griffin Jax (R)
Saturday, September 26 at 7:15 – Cristopher Sanchez vs TBA
Sunday, September 27 at 3:05p – Zack Wheeler vs TBA
The silver lining here is that the Rays should have the #1 seed in the AL wrapped up before Friday. However, the Brewers are still fighting with the Dodgers. While they should be going all out still, at least we will not be facing Jacob Misiorowski. They have won 10 out of their last 12.
Cubs
The Cubs face the Marlins at home then travel to Boston to end the season. While the Marlins are dead in the water, the Red Sox may not have anything to play for either considering they are about to wrap up the 5 seed and a likely trip to Yankee Stadium in the first round of the playoffs. With their ownership of every tiebreak, it would be a shock if the Cubs didn’t land WC1. However, if they go into one of their patented swoons, that could up end everything,
Padres
The Padres have been the hottest team in baseball and are probably the team I want to face least in the first round despite the Phillies sweeping them in the regular season. They’ve won 13 out of 14 but now go on the road to face the Dodgers followed by what could be a dramatic final series or nothing at all against Arizona at home to end the season. The Dodgers go Yoshinobu Yamamoto followed by Blake Snell. The doomsday scenario for San Diego is to go 1-5 while Arizona wins out. They’ll want to take that out of the equation against their hated rivals in LA.
Diamondbacks
Arizona just keeps hanging around and I don’t like it one bit. Now they get to go to Colorado before facing a Padres team that could clinch the playoffs before their series begins. While the Padres could find themselves running out of rope, the Phillies are the ones in danger here. A Diamondbacks sweep of the Rockies (who have lost 12 of 14) keeps the pressure on the Phillies to reduce their magic number themselves against the Brewers. If we lose two to Milwaukee things get interesting. The lead would be 2 games with 3 to play and Arizona having the tiebreak. It would take a real disaster, but this is baseball and toxic events like that happen all the time.
Overview
The Phillies don’t NEED help technically, but they could sure use some. One Phillies win and one D’Backs loss would do a lot to ease our pain and put us on the brink of the playoffs.
- I’m fatally optimistic when it comes to the Phillies for some reason, so in a perfect world I imagine Cristopher Sanchez going 6 in Game 1 then 2 innings of Luzardo followed by Duran while McFarlane and Alvarado get us from Wheeler to Duran in Game 2. ↩︎
- Kyle Harrison was supposed to start this game, but he came on in relief for Game 1. I suppose he could still be an option though as they try to get him back on track. His ERA was 2.79 a month ago but it’s ballooned to 4.23 since with 21 earned runs in 9.1 innings over 5 starts. He’s been a mess ↩︎
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