MLB Wild Card Races
A baseball fan’s work is never done.
We’ve spent all year building up a working knowledge of Major League Baseball and how to make a buck or two off America’s national pastime. Are we going to jump off the gravy train now that football has started? This is exactly the time to bet on baseball. The market is soft, the teams that are out of the playoff hunt are losing as fast as they can, and the teams still in contention are giving it their all to make it to October.
There’s one division race that can still be called a race: the National League West, where the Los Angeles Dodgers (86-59, 14.45 units) are four games up on the Colorado Rockies (82-63, 13.55 units) with under 20 games remaining in the regular season. The bigger excitement is in the Wild Card races. In the National League, the Rockies have lost three in a row, allowing the San Francisco Giants (78-66, 9.69 units) to crawl back within 3.5 games of a postseason berth. The American League has the Boston Red Sox (84-58, 13.12 units) winning five in a row to move 4.5 games ahead of the Texas Rangers (80-63, 18.67 units).
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The Red Sox are very much in the driver’s seat. They have the best run differential among all the Wild Card candidates at +123 on the season, nearly double the +62 posted by the Rangers thus far. Going into Monday’s action, the Sox were 11-4 to win the AL pennant compared to 12-1 for the Rangers. And Daisuke Matsuzaka (18-3, 2.90 ERA last year) is scheduled to make his return to the lineup on Tuesday night after spending three months on the sidelines getting his arm back into shape from apparent overuse.
Matsuzaka will be thrown directly into the fire against the AL West-leading Los Angeles Angels (86-57, 22.38 units) in the start of a three-game set at Fenway Park. 
This is one of two speed bumps left in Boston’s path; the other comes in less than two weeks when the Sox wrap up a 10-day road trip with three games against the New York Yankees (93-52, 10.15 units). They lead Boston by 7.5 games in the AL East and are even-money favorites to win the pennant. That’s the hard part. Otherwise, the Sox have four series remaining against losing teams and no games against the Rangers to worry about.
The road ahead is tougher for Texas. There are two series (totaling seven games) left against the Angels, and the season ends with three games at Safeco Field against the Seattle Mariners (74-70, 6.93 units), who just finished taking two of three from the Rangers in Arlington. The bright spot on the schedule is six more games against the Oakland Athletics (65-78, -0.16 units), except they’ve already proved themselves hard to kill with a 9-0 shutout Monday night, burying the Rangers as +185 road dogs. When Brett Tomko is outdueling Scott Feldman, you know things aren’t going your way.
Over in the senior circuit, it looked for a while like the Rockies were going to run away with the Wild Card after stringing together eight consecutive wins. But their act isn’t going over as well on the road (37-36, 6.80 units) as it is at Coors Field (45-27, 6.75 units). Colorado dropped the last two games of their series with the lowly San Diego Padres, then fell 9-1 on Monday to Tim Lincecum and the Giants (-170).
This is still Colorado’s race to lose. The futures market had the Rockies priced at 7-2 to win the NL pennant, with the Giants at 20-1 and assorted Wild Card fringe candidates at much longer odds. But San Francisco has two more games coming up at AT&T Park against the Rockies, ending with an ESPN broadcast (Wednesday, 10:15 p.m. Eastern) featuring Matt Cain (13-5, 2.61 ERA) against Jorge De La Rosa (14-9, 4.37 ERA) in a favorable pitching matchup for San Fran supporters.
The rest of the 2009 schedule is kinder to the Giants. Both teams have to face the Dodgers on the road, but the NL Central comes calling at the end of September, and the Rockies have three games on tap against the division-leading St. Louis Cardinals (85-60, 11.85 units). San Francisco has four games versus the Chicago Cubs (74-68, -10.81 units). This race ain’t over yet.
