MLB Bullets slides in not-so-safely

It’s the last Monday of the regular season. That’s hard to believe.

• Yankees clinch! The-uh-uh-uh Yankees clinch . . .a wild card spot.
• It was a pretty pyrrhic victory for the Yanks as the game was won on a walk-off double by Aaron Hicks, scoring shortstop Didi Gregorius, But Gregorius tore the cartilage in his right wrist on the play and may be out for the rest of the year.
• Coley Harvey profiles Hicks, whom he calls the Yankees’ anonymous hero.
• The Yankees weren’t the only team that got their playoff ticket punched as the Braves clinched the NL East.
• Bob Nightengale talks to Braves manager Brian Snitker, who guided the team to their first NL East title since 2013, about his lifetime journey with the Braves and his comparison of this year’s Braves to the 1991 Braves. Also, Nightengale reveals that former Braves general manager John Coppolella had decided to fire Snitker before this season, but then Coppolella got fired and banned from baseball before he could carry it out.
• The Diamondbacks led the NL West on September 1, but after getting swept by the Rockies over the weekend they were officially eliminated from the postseason. Eric Stephen breaks down the D-Backs stunning collapse.
• R.J. Anderson also looks at Arizona’s September disaster and blames every hitter but Paul Goldschmidt for not hitting. I have a lot of sympathy for Diamondbacks fans as their team’s collapse reminds me a lot of the Cubs in 1977, although the Cubs collapse started a few weeks earlier than the Diamondbacks fall did.
• The Mariners also are not going to make the playoffs, extending the longest playoff drought in North American sports. Jack Baer explains what went wrong in Seattle.
• The Phillies were eliminated from the postseason after a four-game sweep by the Braves over the weekend. Matt Snyder claims that the Phillies’ bad team defense is a big reason for the team’s fall from grace this season.
• The Red Sox have 104 wins and need just two more to set a new team record for wins in a season. But Gabe Lacques writes that they still need to win the World Series to be the greatest Red Sox team of all-time.
• David Schoenfield breaks down the NL West race between the Dodgers and Rockies, which looks like it will go down to the final weekend. Schoenfield thinks it’s amazing that the two teams are this close and he’s probably right.
• The Indians became the first team to have four pitchers strike out 200 batters in a season.
• The Indians clearly aren’t one of these teams, but Jeff Sullivan looks at some teams that might want to consider using the “opener” strategy in the playoffs. (ESPN+ sub. req.)
• Ben Lindbergh has a piece on the importance of pitch framing and how it became so big in today’s game. He also notes that the gap between the best and the worst framers is shrinking.
• Can ballplayers today stand up to the greats of the past? Craig Edwards writes that the current crop of 25-year-olds in MLB is the greatest generation of players ever. Hmm, who on the Cubs is 25?
• The Rangers fired manager Jeff Banister, which surprised no one.
• Also not surprising is that the Orioles are expected to fire manager Buck Showalter. Showalter has managed 20 seasons and has a grand total of two first-place finishes, one playoff series win and one wild-card game win. One of the two first-place finishes doesn’t really count since it was the 1994 Yankees when the season ended early because of the strike. Still, I don’t think he’s a bad manager, at least not anymore. Zach Britton may beg to differ.
• David Laurila speaks with Mets manager Mickey Callaway about what he’s learned in his first season managing.
• You probably know this already, but White Sox broadcaster Hawk Harrelson broadcast his final game on Sunday. I’m in the camp that Harrelson is a terrible broadcaster, but I do have to say that his goodbye was touching. I do know he means a lot to many White Sox fans, so I wish him and his family the best.
• And the Dodgers honored their longtime broadcaster Jaime Jarrin by inducting him into the Dodgers Ring of Honor. Jarrin has now been broadcasting Los Angeles Dodgers games for longer than Vin Scully did, although Scully did have the eight years in Brooklyn. However, the Dodgers have announced that Jarrin will be back for 2019 and 2020.
• David Schoenfield shares his ten favorite baseball stories from 2018.
• Emma Baccellieri looks at the AL Cy Young Award race between Chris Sale and Blake Snell. She thinks it’s one of the great matchups of all-time.
• This won’t go over well here, but John Fisher makes the case for Christian Yelich for National League MVP. I noticed he never mentions the word “defense” in his case.
• Free agent Jose Bautista says he wants to play for a contender in 2019. Good luck with that. I guess I can see someone signing him cheap on the hope that they could flip him to a contender if he has a good season and just cut him if he doesn’t.
• Tigers DH Victor Martinez won’t play next year and in fact, he played his final game on Saturday. Improbably, the notoriously slow-footed Martinez beat out an infield single in his final major league at-bat.
• The Dodgers’ Chase Utley and the Rangers Adrian Beltre received big ovations in their final home games. Beltre hasn’t announced his retirement yet, but he has indicated he’s leaning that way. In any case, he’s a free agent at the end of the season. Utley still probably has some playoff games.
• Blue Jays closer Ken Giles took a shot at his former team when he said he’s enjoying playing with the Blue Jays a lot more than he did with the Astros, even though he won a World Series in Houston.
• Bad news for the Astros as starter Charlie Morton left a start after one inning with right shoulder discomfort.
• Yuli Gurriel and Lourdes Gurriel became the first set of brothers to both hit at least two home runs in a game on the same day. Too bad it wasn’t the same game. But that gives the brothers something to shoot for.
• Rob Mains wonders: Who was the worst hitter to ever hit for the cycle?
• Minor league baseball attendance was down this year. Part of that was the result of fewer games, but a lot of it wasn’t.
• Matt Ellis looks at the history of baseball in Pawtucket and Worcester as the Pawtucket Red Sox plan to move to Worcester in 2021. Did you know that Worcester had a team in the National League from 1880 to 1882? Hall of Famer John Clarkson pitched for the team briefly before he became a Chicago White Stocking.
• Ichiro Suzuki got into a pillow fight with the Rangers mascot.
• And finally, I very much liked this piece by former Red Sox first baseman Lars Anderson about playing professional baseball in Germany this summer. I bet you didn’t even know they had a professional baseball league in Germany. That’s OK, because I imagine that most Germans don’t know that either. But they do. Anderson’s team, the Alligators, had an unexploded bomb from World War II buried in their outfield.

And tomorrow will be a better day than today, Buster.