For weeks, all I’ve heard from Orioles fans during the team’s two-steps-forward, two-steps-back momentum centers on one central question: “Think the O’s can make the playoffs?”
I’ve got news for you: For all intents and purposes, the playoffs have been going on for weeks already.
Teams have been treading water and trying to outlast their competitors for a month or so.
What are the playoffs, basically? Win or be eliminated, right? This is it. We’re there.
Sure, these are still regular-season games — no one will ever convince you that they’re not — but these last 20 games or so, and especially this final week, is simply posturing for playoff position. Especially with the addition of the wild card game five seasons ago.
The wild card matchup, by design, is a cruel feature for fans and managers who are trying to figure out a strategy for the pitching rotation: It’s playing head-to-head for one game. You win, you advance to the division series in a much more forgiving best-of-five series.
As far as the starting pitcher, do you go with your best arm available for the one-game matchup, and risk not having him available until midway through the next series? Or do you hold off on using your best arm until the beginning of the ALDS, but risk not even making it that far by starting a lesser pitcher?
In 2012, in the first-ever postseason wild card game, Buck Showalter went with Door No. 2, starting journeyman Joe Saunders — who the Orioles acquired just a couple months earlier from Arizona — in the one-game round on the road against the Rangers in Arlington, Texas. Fortunately for Birdland, Saunders turned in arguably the highlight of his career and helped lift the Orioles to a 5-1 victory with a 5 2/3-inning stint before handing off to the Orioles’ bullpen. Jason Hammel was able to be saved for the opener against the Yankees — and Showalter had a much more palatable rotation for what was the five-game series.
As it turned out, the rotation wasn’t the reason the Orioles faltered against the Yankees, but it was the bullpen, which was a staple of Baltimore reaching the postseason and logging the team’s first winning season in 15 years. The ninth-inning meltdown at Camden Yards against New York was probably the beginning of the end for Jim Johnson as an Oriole — in what is still one of the quickest falls from grace in franchise history.
But we digress. This is 2016 and the Orioles haven’t even clinched a wild card yet. Think of these last five games as part of the end of an epic game of musical chairs that has been going since the end of August.
You know musical chairs: All the kids take lap around a row of chairs. The music stops, everyone tries to claim a chair until one is left without a seat. He/she is out of the game, a chair is removed, and the process continues until only one kid sitting in a chair is left.
Last night, the reigning World Series champion Kansas City Royals were left standing among all the filled seats when the Orioles eliminated them (yeah, no tears from this end, right?) with their victory in Toronto.
In the next couple games, we figure the Yankees, Astros and Mariners figure to be squeezed out, since they’re the furthest behind the race. The Blue Jays — who lead the Orioles by one game (and win a hypothetical tiebreaker over Baltimore by winning the season series) for the No. 1 and host wild card spot, and the Orioles lead the Tigers by one game (and also hold the season series advantage over Detroit) for the last spot.
Who’s going to be left out when the music stops in five games? The music will start up again at 7 p.m., tonight.
