Now nine days to play before the bell rings on baseball’s postseason and the watchlist is growing. There are nine teams still playing with an urgent need to win, but not all of the critical remaining games are about playoff berths.
Take, for instance, tonight’s White Sox-Twins game in Minnesota. Twins hitter Luis Arraez will face Chicago boss Lance Lynn with a batting title on the line. Arraez is hitting .313, just a point behind American League leader Aaron Judge of the Yankees. Boston’s Xander Bogaerts is also hitting .313, although he trails Arraez by a few more decimal points.
Arraez, and Bogaerts if he can get hot, are the only hitters standing in the way of Judge winning an AL Triple Crown for the first time since Miguel Cabrera did it for the Tigers in 2012. Cabrera, in fact, still stands as baseball’s only Triple Crown winner in the so-called divisional era, since 1969. Judge already holds sizable AL leads in the other two legs of the crown, in home runs (60) and RBIs (128).
The Braves, meanwhile, cut the Mets’ NL East lead to just one game on Monday after an 8-0 rout of the Nationals in DC And the Blue Jays, behind a Vladimir Guerrero Jr. walk-off win over the Yankees in the 10th inning, moved one game closer to a wild-card berth.
The key games to Tuesday, with wild-card and division title implications:
EN:
Marlins (Pablo Lopez) at Mets (Carlos Carrasco)
Braves (Kyle Muller) at Nationals (Paolo Espino)
Dodgers (Tyler Anderson) at Padres (Blake Snell)
Phillies (Zack Wheeler) at Cubs (Marcus Stroman)
Cardinals (Miles Mikolas) at Brewers (Adrian Houser)
AL:
Yankees (Jameson Taillon) at Blue Jays (Jose Berrios)
Rays (Corey Kluber) at Guardians (Shane Bieber)
Rangers (Jesus Tinoco) at Mariners (Robbie Ray)
Orioles (Kyle Bradish) at Red Sox (Michael Wacha)