Periodically, we’ve been taking a look at the American League playoff contenders on Camden Chat. And every week we lament that the Orioles haven’t made any progress, but it turns out that no one else has made any progress either. Let’s take a look at the latest developments in the AL playoff race.
AL East
| team | B | M | PCT | Great Britain |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| team | B | M | PCT | Great Britain |
| PORIOLES | 68 | 48 | 0.586 | — |
| New York Yankees | 68 | 48 | 0.586 | — |
| Boston Red Sox | 61 | 52 | 0.54 | 5.5 |
The Orioles and Yankees division battle hasn’t exactly resembled a heavyweight fight lately. It’s been more like a slugfest between Napoleon Dynamite and his brother. Both teams have been stuck in a stretch of mediocrity for the past month or more, with each playing so poorly that it failed to win the division even as the other struggled. Both are coming off series losses to uncompetitive teams, with the O’s losing two of three games in Toronto and the Yanks losing twice at home to the Angels.
The bad news for the Orioles is that the Yankees’ schedule is about to get very, very easy. For the rest of August, they play only one of their six complete series against a winning team (the Guardians). Their other opponents during that period are the Rangers, Tigers, Rockies, Nationals and the pathetic White Sox, each with three games. Perhaps one or more of those teams will do to the Yankees what the Angels just did, but I wouldn’t count on it.
The O’s, on the other hand, have a brutal schedule during this period. Five of their next six opponents have winning records: the Rays, Red Sox, Mets, Astros and Dodgers. It’s certainly not a good time for the Orioles to be without the services of Grayson Rodriguez, further weakening the rotation against teams that will be unforgiving to weaker pitchers.
The Orioles and Yankees leave the door open just wide enough for Boston to remain relevant in the AL East conversation, although the Red Sox have their own issues, particularly a pitching staff that has a 6.02 ERA since the All-Star break. They’re hitting the ball hard, though, scoring 41 runs and hitting a league-leading 13 home runs in their last six games. The Sox have four games left against the Yankees and a whopping seven against the Orioles, so they still have a chance to make a splash in the division race.
AL Wild Card
| team | B | M | PCT | Great Britain |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| team | B | M | PCT | Great Britain |
| New York Yankees | 68 | 48 | 0.586 | (+)4 |
| Minnesota Twins | 63 | 50 | 0.558 | (+)0.5 |
| Kansas City Royals | 64 | 52 | 0.552 | — |
| Boston Red Sox | 61 | 52 | 0.54 | 1.5 |
| Seattle Mariners | 59 | 56 | 0.513 | 4.5 |
| Tampa Bay Rays | 58 | 56 | 0.509 | 5 |
| Detroit Tigers | 55 | 60 | 0.478 | 8.5 |
| Texas Rangers | 54 | 61 | 0.47 | 9.5 |
The Red Sox and Royals just finished a series with huge wild card implications, and Boston has won two of three games to move one game closer to Kansas City for the final wild card spot. The Mariners are next in line, but for them, the path to the division crown (just a half game behind the Astros) is much easier than the wild card. It looks like the AL West will send only one team to the playoffs, unlike last year when the Astros and Rangers both advanced with identical 90-72 scores and later met in the ALCS.
With that in mind, the Rangers may regret their decision not to sell out completely at this year’s trade deadline. Entering the trade deadline on July 30, they were 3.5 games behind the AL West race, but since then they’ve gone 2-6 and fallen 5.5 games behind the league-leading Astros and well out of the wild card race. In a seller’s market, the Rangers could have gotten a ton of promising players for veteran pitchers like Nathan Eovaldi, David Robertson and Kirby Yates. Instead, they fell short and now have just a 0.5 percent chance of reaching the postseason, according to Baseball Reference.
The Twins have been hanging on to the second or third wild-card spot all season, but they’re not exactly in a comfortable position for the postseason. Their next seven games are all against their two AL Central rivals — the Guardians host four times, the Royals three times — and they can either improve their playoff position or make it much, much worse.
AL postseason games if the season ended today
#1 Guardians (AL Central winner) – First round bye
#2 ORIOLES (Winner of the AL East) – Bye in the first round
#3 Astros (AL West winner) host #6 Royals (third wildcard) in WC Series
#4 Yankees (first wildcard) host #5 Twins (second wildcard) in WC Series
That’s right — the Orioles, despite some fans’ complaints that the team is terrible, full of mistakes, and can’t win a single game to save their lives, would have a bye in the first round of the postseason if the season ended today. They’re only percentage points behind Cleveland for the best overall record in the AL, and they have the tiebreaker over the Yankees for the division lead.
This is primarily a testament to how well the Orioles have played in the first half of the season. They have won so many games that even their .500 record in recent weeks has not hurt their chances. It also shows that there are no truly dominant teams in the league this year. No major league club has a winning percentage of .600 or more.
Are you now more optimistic about the Orioles’ chances of winning the World Series this year? Maybe. Maybe not. But even in this turbulent season, they remain one of the best teams in MLB.
