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Outside The Confines: Onward to the Division Series

The newest form of the Wild Card is over, and now the hunt for the Series is on.

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Wild Card Series - Philadelphia Phillies v St. Louis Cardinals - Game Two Photo by Stacy Revere/Getty Images

You can’t call baseball boring, but you can certainly call it unexpected. This past weekend we say eight teams battle it out in the newest form of the postseason, as four Wild Card best-of-three series took place.

The Rays and Guardians played for about forty-five years, only to see a rookie make the 15th inning walk-off win a sentence that actually happened. And the Phillies, who I don’t think many thought would get this far just a few months ago, bested the Cards and sent some veteran players into retirement a few weeks early. The Mariners bested the Jays after a late-innings comeback, and their underdog quest for glory continues. And the Padres took care of the 101-win Mets, but not until after this happened during the game:

I think there’s a lot to like about this new postseason formula. More teams get a shot, we get more games, and the one-game Wild Card was always insanely stressful, where this feels like a fair balance to determine who the best team really is (one run in 24 innings, Tampa Bay? Come on). That said, the 2014 Wild Card game between the Royals and A’s remains possibly one of the single greatest games of baseball I’ve ever seen, so maybe I’m a one-game Wild Card apologist sometimes.

Most of today’s stories will be postseason-related, but there’s always some non-playoff content to share as well.

And here’s the non-postseason stuff.

  • This might be the coolest thing to pop up in my Twitter feed this week.

And tomorrow will be a better day, Buster. Make it so.