The MLB regular season schedule features 162 games for each of the league’s 30 teams.
It’s going to come down to Game 162 to decide the playoff fate of the Arizona Diamondbacks in relation to the Philadelphia Phillies and the National League Wild Card standings.
The Diamondbacks have had hot streaks and cold, milestones and injuries, smiles and tears. And now it’s Sunday, Sept. 27, the day that was scheduled from the beginning as the final day of the regular season.
And there’s still something to play for, a postseason berth not yet clinched or denied, the premise of future baseball still hanging in the balance.
The Diamondbacks lost on Saturday night to the San Diego Padres, 10-7, which could’ve doomed their season.
Except the Phillies couldn’t beat the Tampa Bay Rays, either. Their gap in the NL Wild Card remained the same.
Entering Sunday, the Phillies hold a one-game lead on the Diamondbacks. It’s the last playoff spot in the National League that needs to be decided. And it could still go either way.
Diamondbacks Playoff Scenarios
There is one path, and one path only, in which the Diamondbacks get into the playoffs on the final day of the season as the third-and-final NL Wild Card team.
Arizona needs two things to happen:
- Diamondbacks beat Padres.
- Rays beat Phillies.
If those both happen, Arizona and Philadelphia will have exactly the same record.
In that case, it goes to MLB’s tiebreaker rules. The first tiebreaker is head-to-head season record, but the Diamondbacks and Phillies split their season series, 3-3.
The second tiebreaker is intra-division record, meaning a team’s mark against the other teams in its division. In that category, the Diamondbacks beat the Phillies.
So if they end up with the same record, the Diamondbacks make it into the postseason and the Phillies go home.
Now because the Phillies have a one-game lead, there are two ways for Philadelphia to hold off Arizona.
If the Phillies win on Sunday, it doesn’t matter what Arizona does — Philadelphia would be going to the playoffs.
And if the Phillies lose, they still hold off the Diamondbacks if they also lose.
The only chance the Diamondbacks have is the double result of Arizona win and Philadelphia loss. At least it’s not more complicated than that, though. They need to control what they can control and then hope the Rays have one more helping hand for them.
Rays Irony
For what it’s worth, the Diamondbacks and Rays have been connected since the beginning.
Arizona and Tampa Bay (then-Devil Rays) were expansion teams into MLB who both started play in 1998.
Now here 28 years later, the Diamondbacks need the Rays to do them a solid. It’s almost like they share a birthday, and now they’ll see if they can come through for one another.
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