Three NL Teams Are Within a Game of Each Other and Only One Race Is Left. It Is Not the One the Standings Show

The National League wild-card standings say three teams are separated by one game. Chicago is 87-69. San Diego is 87-69. Philadelphia is 86-70. Six clubs have already clinched — Milwaukee, Los Angeles and Atlanta in the National League, Tampa Bay, New York and Boston in the American — and these three are, barring a collapse nobody should be planning around, the rest of the National League field.

So the drama on the surface is fake. All three are going. What is being settled this week is seeding, and seeding in this format is worth more than the standings make it look.

Here is the part that most coverage of this race has left out: the Cubs and Padres are not tied.

A tie is not a tie

Major League Baseball stopped playing tiebreaker games. Ties are now resolved by head-to-head record, and Chicago won its season series against both Philadelphia and San Diego. Philadelphia, in turn, holds the tiebreaker over San Diego.

That chain does real work. If the Cubs and Padres finish level at, say, 91-71, Chicago is the No. 4 seed and hosts a best-of-three at Wrigley Field; San Diego packs. Which means San Diego's task is not "catch Chicago." It is "finish a full game ahead of Chicago." A club looking at an identical record in the same column of the same table is in fact one game down, with six to play.

The same is true of Philadelphia relative to Chicago, and the Phillies are already a game behind on the raw record — so their real deficit for the host spot is closer to two.

This is not a technicality. It is the difference between playing three games at home and playing three games on the road in October, and it is currently invisible to anybody reading the standings the way standings have been read for a century. CBS Sports has it right: the Cubs hold the No. 4 seed "thanks to a strong record against the Phillies and Padres this year." The tiebreaker is the standing.

The clinch math, which is nearly finished

Chicago needs one win to lock a postseason berth. San Diego needs two. Those are small numbers and they will fall almost immediately, which is why the berth question is over and the seed question is not.

Arizona is the only club with a live mathematical path in, and it is a narrow one. MLB's own standings page has the Diamondbacks four games back with an elimination number of three. We will flag a discrepancy here rather than smooth it: ESPN's overall standings, read the same afternoon, showed Arizona with a materially better record than MLB.com's page did. We went with the league's own table, which is internally consistent with its games-back column. If ESPN is right, Arizona is closer than this piece implies. We could not reconcile the two and we are not going to pick the more dramatic version because it makes a better paragraph.

Either way, the interesting thing about Arizona is not its odds. It is where the Diamondbacks are on the last weekend.

The schedule quirk that decides San Diego's October

San Diego closes its home schedule on Sunday, September 27, against Arizona.

Follow what that means. If Arizona arrives in San Diego still alive, the Padres are playing a desperate team with its season on the line, in the series that determines whether the Padres host or travel. If Arizona has been eliminated by then — and its elimination will largely be decided by how Philadelphia plays, since Philadelphia is the team Arizona has to catch — the Padres are playing a club whose flights home are booked.

So San Diego's seeding depends partly on Philadelphia's results, and not through the standings. It runs through whether Philadelphia's winning removes the urgency from San Diego's final opponent. That is the kind of second-order dependency that decides a playoff bracket and never appears in a magic-number graphic.

We should be careful about the rest of the closing schedules. Reporting from the weekend listed the three contenders' remaining opponents when they each had eight or nine games left, and by Monday that had become six. Series that were "upcoming" on Saturday are partly played. We have not independently reconstructed each club's day-by-day slate and are not going to describe games we have not verified are still to come.

How San Diego got here

Eleven wins in twelve games. That is the run that took the Padres from five and a half back to level, and it is the reason a race that looked settled a fortnight ago is now a genuine three-way argument about home field.

Runs like that are worth exactly one thing at this point in a season — they are how the Padres arrived — and worth nothing as a forecast. A club that wins eleven of twelve in September has not discovered a new gear; it has had a good fortnight, which is the same sample that produces a 1-11 stretch in a different month for the same roster. San Diego's position is real. The momentum story attached to it is not evidence.

The counterargument: seeding barely matters

The best version of the case against everything above is straightforward. The prize for the top two seeds is a bye, and all three of these teams missed it — Milwaukee and Los Angeles have that locked up. What is left is home field in a best-of-three, which is the smallest home-field edge available in the sport. Three games is a coin-flip sample. Teams win road series in October constantly. So this is drama about a rounding error.

There is force in that, and we are not going to counter it with a made-up figure about how often home teams win wild-card series, because we have not verified one.

What we would say instead is that the seed is not only about home field. It determines the opponent, and the opponent in a three-game series is most of the variance — a short series against a team whose rotation lines up badly for you is a different proposition from one against a team it lines up well against. It also determines travel into the division series for whoever survives. And there is a practical point that is easy to be too cool about: for a Cubs team that has not hosted much October baseball lately, three games at Wrigley is not a rounding error to the people who would have to fly to San Diego instead.

One more thing worth watching this week

Pete Crow-Armstrong is two stolen bases from a 40-40 season. He has 44 home runs, which is the most any left-handed hitter has hit in a season in Cubs history — he passed Billy Williams' 1970 mark of 42 to get there. He leads the major leagues in WAR, runs, games played and total bases, and he is the National League MVP favourite.

Six players have gone 40-40 — Jose Canseco, Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Alfonso Soriano, Ronald Acuña Jr. and Shohei Ohtani. If he gets the two bags he is the seventh, the first Cub ever, and the third in four seasons, which says at least as much about how the running game has changed as it does about him.

The postseason starts September 29. Everything above is decided before then, most of it in games that will be played while people are watching football.