wild-card - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
MLB's final 10 days in the American League will be pure chaos
Entering the penultimate weekend of baseball’s regular season, so much is in flux. The calming part is the National League. Every division race is wrapped up and the Wild Card will become a matter of which pair of teams are the odd ones out between the Arizona Diamondbacks, Chicago Cubs, Miami Marli...
Behold, the magic of the Blue Jays' face-plant!
It’s been a wonky season for the Toronto Blue Jays. It was supposed to be the one where they leaped from just a playoff team to AL East titan. Didn’t work out. Part of it is that Alek Manoah started throwing wiffle balls. Another part is that Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s power went to the zoo for most of...
MLB scheduling change making it easier for American League East to assert its dominance
Six months or so after the NFC East was the best division in football, the American League East has overtaken MLB. No team is below .500 as of Friday morning/early afternoon, and the fives clubs are a combined 105-56 against opponents outside the division. The Tampa Bay Rays (37-15) and Baltimore Or...
How many wins do the Angels need at the deadline to keep Shohei Ohtani?
If the Los Angeles Angels don’t make the playoffs this season then there’s no question that Shohei Ohtani is gone. Now in his sixth MLB season and heading into free agency, he has yet to reach the postseason and has said that winning is the most important thing to him....
Derek Carr wasn’t that ‘mothaf*cker’ and now he’s not the Raiders’ starting quarterback
Getting suplexed by the lowly Steelers and Kenny Pickett on Sunday Night Football finally broke the spell Derek Carr has on the Raiders. On Wednesday, Raiders head coach Josh McDaniels decided to bench the Raiders’ starting quarterback of the last nine years for the final two weeks of the regular se...
Should a player’s legacy be defined by postseason results?
Justin Verlander has a great shot at winning the American League Cy Young award this year. He pieced together a dominant season — at age 39 — after recovering from Tommy John surgery and helped lead the Houston Astros to another World Series. ...
Rob Manfred strikes again!
MLB entered its last series of the season on Monday, and there wasn’t a game on the schedule worth watching. Wild-card seeding doesn’t really get the blood going, y’know....
If expanding MLB playoffs was about keeping people interested, why does no one care?
The concepts of “parity” and “fairness” in sports were exposed as fig leaves long ago. The idea that fans would care more, i.e. buy more tickets and watch more games on TV, if more teams had a chance at playoff berths and championships was never as important to owners. What was important was not bei...
This is Aaron Judge’s year, but if Yankees win a title, Giancarlo Stanton will be the reason
Make no mistake about it, this season belongs to Aaron Judge and his historic run through MLB America....
Should the Rays, Jays, and Mariners race to the bottom?
We knew the new baseball playoff system, with the addition of a third wildcard team, would create quirks. In a vacuum, it works because all division winners are considered equal. But in reality, where people play the games, they very much are not. Teams are hard to judge on just their record, becaus...
Deadspin Fixes: the MLB playoff format
I noticed Dodgers fans were already bitching to protect themselves even before first pitch about the unfairness of the playoff system that saw their team win 106 games yet faced with the indignity of having to play in the Wild-Card Game. Followed nicely with Yankees fans complaining last night, beca...
No wild-card chaos
Most seasons, on the last day, we hope for some kind of chaos to hit MLB’s playoff system. I think, deep down, it’s because people want to see the wild-card sham proven to be just that. Because having teams play a game just to play a game to get into the playoffs after 162 games and six months is pr...