MLB Bullets is brought to you by the number 163

Happy 163 Day!

• You may have heard that there will be two games today to decide the NL Central and the NL West. Jeff Passan has a preview of what he thinks will be a perfect day for baseball.
• David Schoenfield examines the two matchups today.
• The only National League playoff team not playing today is the Atlanta Braves, who, ironically, have the worst record of the five teams. But Grant Brisbee has the next chapter of his “rock bottom” series which looks how the Braves climbed out of the basement and became NL East champions.
• Brisbee didn’t get to write his “rock bottom” piece on the Phillies because Philadelphia fell apart down the stretch, finished under .500 and may not have hit rock bottom yet. But Brisbee does have a piece on what the Phillies collapse means for their future in 2019 and beyond.
• Athletics slugger Khris Davis had a .247 batting average in 2015. In 2016, it was .247. Last year, it was also .247. For the fourth-straight year, Davis hit .247. He’s the first player with an identical batting average (rounded to three decimals) in four straight years in MLB history.
• On the other hand, the other Chris Davis, the one who plays for the Orioles, finished the season with a .168 batting average. That’s the worst batting average ever for a player with enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title.
• Eddie Matz has a recap of the Orioles historically sad season. In fact, it starts with one of the saddest stories I’ve heard all year. The Orioles have a daycare center at Camden Yards for the kids of the players. It was full of kids at the beginning of the season, but by mid-August, Caleb Joseph was the only father left on the team and his three-year-old son couldn’t understand why all of his friends were gone. (Including Manny Machado’s wife, who doesn’t have kids yet but spent much of her time playing with the toddlers in the daycare center.)
• The Yankees did indeed break the single-season team home run record.
• Rockies outfielder Charlie Blackmon became the first player ever to hit for the cycle in game 162. Unfortunately, we can’t call it the last game of the season, which is going to confuse people in 40 years when someone hits for the cycle on the actual last day of the season.
• In one of the worst-kept secrets of the year, Angels manager Mike Scioscia announced he would not be managing the team next year, ending a 19-year run with the Halos.
• Tim Brown writes that Scioscia was a good manager and the Angels were lucky to have him.
• Liz Roscher has a list of other managers who could get canned in the next few days as well as some that were thought to be in danger but apparently aren’t.
• A couple of catchers got the opportunity to become player-managers for the final game of the year. J.T. Realmuto took over for Don Mattingly for the Marlins last game.
• And Russell Martin managed the Blue Jays final game of the year. Both teams lost in their managerial debuts.
• Mets third baseman David Wright played his final game of his career on Saturday. Mark Townsend has all the details of the emotional farewell.
• Ian O’Connor thinks that Wright had earned every moment of that special night at Citi Field.
• Lee Jenkins has an appreciation of Wright’s wonderful career, including a pretty good joke Wright played on Jenkins early in Wright’s career.
• Twins first baseman Joe Mauer played catcher one final time in an emotional game at Target Field. Mauer hasn’t announced his retirement, but the game sure did feel like a retirement ceremony.
• Nationals outfielder Bryce Harper got a little choked up in an interview after the Nats final game of the season, in what most think will be his final game for Washington.
• Hunter Pence played what was probably his final game with the Giants and he rode off the field in a scooter that the organization gave him, waving to the fans the whole way.
• Chad Thornburg has a list of players who may be leaving their long-time teams after this weekend, either through retirement or free agency.
• Scott Boeck picks an MVP for every MLB team.
• Zack Greinke, Hall-of-Famer? Jay Jaffe looks at Greinke’s latest strong season and assesses whether he’ll make it to Cooperstown one day.
• Believe it or not, Angels outfielder Mike Trout’s 2018 season may just have been his best performance yet. Alden Gonzalez writes that no matter how good Trout is, he always thinks he can get better. And he always seems to find a way to do it, too.
• Trout’s teammate Shohei Ohtani talks about his rookie season and re-affirms that he made the right choice in signing with the Angels.
• Peter Gammons criticizes baseball’s obsession with velocity in pitching and says it is ruining the health of pitchers. (The Athletic sub. req.) He also criticizes the “bullpenning” strategy as feeding in to that velocity obsession and gets Theo Epstein on record as recommending that teams only be allowed to carry 11 pitchers.
• Red Sox ace Chris Sale had the lowest velocity of his career in his last start, which I’m sure the Red Sox fan base shrugged off as no big deal. In any case, the Red Sox insist that Sale is not hurt, saying only that his mechanics were off. Of course, when a pitcher’s mechanics are off it’s often because something doesn’t feel right, but I’m sure Red Sox fans would tell me I’m being silly.
• Ben Lindbergh has a fascinating article that is probably going to get lost among all the end-of-the season stuff, so it might be something to revisit later on. But he looks at the most recent research on baseball’s so-called “Steroid Era” and says the evidence suggests that most of the offensive explosion of that era had nothing to do with pharmaceuticals. They probably did play a role in extending players’ careers into their late-30s and early-40s, but that’s harder to prove one way or the other.
• And here’s something we’ll definitely be returning to later as a federal grand jury is investigating MLB’s system of signing international amateur players in connection with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
• Emma Baccellieri talks to and profiles pioneering sportswriter Melissa Ludtke, who sued Major League Baseball 40 years ago for the right of female sportswriters to gain access to team clubhouses. She won, of course, and the sport is better for it.
• Steven Goldman looks back at the “Miracle Braves” of 1914 and what we mean when we talk about “Miracle” teams. He also connects this to the 2018 Athletics.
• The Padres renamed their annual prospects game after their late Scouting Director Don Welke.
• I think we’re all pretty familiar with the celebrities who will be cheering on the Cubs this postseason but Jake Mintz has a list of celebrities who may be cheering on some other playoff teams. Somehow, he didn’t mention Kato Kaelin and the Brewers.
• Mets pitcher Noah Syndergaard broke his bat on a swing that didn’t even connect with the ball.
• And finally, Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton homered over the Green Monster in Fenway Park. One of the Red Sox faithful threw the ball back onto the field and it accidentally hit Stanton as he was rounding second base.

And tomorrow will be . . . oh, forget it, Buster. Today we’re getting two game 163s for the first time in history.