Chansky's Notebook: Baseball In October

The wildcard games were wild; that’s October baseball.

Ever since Major League Baseball added a second wildcard team, the do-or-die play-in games have been tense, taut entries into the postseason playoffs. Two teams, with the fourth-and fifth-best records in each league, playing one game to get in.

This year, the six division races were over with at least a week to go, but a half-dozen teams were still vying for the four wildcard spots. It went down to the last day of the regular season before Toronto and Baltimore survived in the American League and the Mets and Giants, teams with birthplaces in New York, made it in the National. And what wild games they were.

The Blue Jays walked off with a 11th-inning win in Toronto when Edwin Encarnacion bombed a three-run homer while the Orioles’ Zack Britton, the best closer in baseball, sat in the bullpen. O’s manager Buck Showalter has caught an earful ever since for going with an old baseball axiom that on the road don’t bring in your closer until you are AHEAD in the bottom half of the last inning. The Jays go on to play at the Rangers who own American League’s top record in the best-of-5 division series. Boston visits Cleveland to start the other.

The National League wildcard was scoreless in the top of the ninth, when San Fran’s Conor Gillaspie hit a three-run homer to beat the Mets, the team with the best record in baseball over the last 40 games, in their own ballpark. The pitching duel matched Giant Madison Bumgarner from Hickory, NC, against Noah Syndegaard, the one starter left from an invincible Mets’ rotation back in April.

The Giants, who have won the World Series the last three even-numbered years, go to Chicago to play the dominant Cubbies who won 103 games and are determined to break their 108-year World Series curse in the best-of-five at Wrigley Field. In the other, the Dodgers visit Washington, teams that won their divisions comfortably but are hardly comfortable moving into playoffs.

These four division series promise to be as wild as the wildcard games. That’s baseball in October.