Things you should watch

While waiting for me to get less busy so I can do a couple more "How 'dem kids doing"

Right now in the AL the divisions are all but set. There's a "Yankees lose all, Orioles win all" scenario still in play but that's about it. Same thing for a bye between the Guardians and Astros*. It's all about the Wild Card where the Royals and Tigers are fending off the Twins and Mariners (we'll bring up the Red Sox Friday if they still matter) for the final two spots

Mariners @ Astros (afternoon game today)

Rays @ Tigers 

Royals @ Nats- Hey the Nats matter!

Marlins @ Twins

In the NL The NL West is still up for grabs and the Padres are making their last play. Basically needing the sweep they started off with the win. The Phillies are pretty much set as 1 or 2 though, and Brewers as 3. So the rest is the Wild Card where the Mets, Dbacks, and Braves are struggling over their last two spots

Padres @ Dodgers (late night baseball!) 

Mets @ Braves

Giants @ Dbacks

This weekend the Padres go to Arizona and the Royals finish in Atlanta for two series that are good bet to have some intrigue. The rest - Tigers are hosting the White Sox, Dodgers are at the Rockies, Mets in Milwuakee, Baltimore at Minnesota, and the Mariners host Oakland. 

Baseball really does have an advantage here over other sports with this end of the year lots of games that could matter thing that happens. It's fun!  

Player-wise not much. Ohtani got to 50/50 already.  Judge could hit 60 but isn't going to blow by it. FWIW - Judge and Ohtani will be the only ones to get to 50, Santander is next at 44.  Soto got to 40 for the first time in his career.  Kind of crazy though that we are in a world now where homers rule batting average and only 8 or so guys will hit over .300, but Judge is definitely going to be one and Ohtani might be another. Even if he hits like .295 he did steal 50 bases. These guys are so good. Also Bobby Witt (only 32 homers) is going to have one of the best non-MVP seasons in a while.

There will be no 20 game winner this year.  Both Skubal and Sale have a chance to get to 19. This could be the first season ever where no one tops 210 IP in the major leagues. A couple guys should (only need 5 1/3 but just a couple guys have a shot).  This is all just a past decade change. The four man rotation died in the 70s as did the "Everyone goes as long as they can" with the advent of closers. By the mid 80s things settled around 250-275 IP with a few outliers. That mostly held for 20 years then in the mid 2000s we saw another drop, presumably for 7th and 8th inning guys coming in. Innings stuck around 225-250 until about a decade ago when we started getting the "no third time around" rule coming in.  

What is this all for? Do pitchers dominate? Nope. Do we have fewer injuries? Doesn't seem like it. I guess a team would have an advantage if everyone else wasn't also doing it. And injuries are a set cost so we accept X many and scale the effort in each pitch to that injury level. Seems pointless to me. 

Again my re-framing of the SP role is that if you are only going to ask 5-6 innings of them, we should go back to 4 man rotations. There's never been a real indication that INNINGS matter, as opposed to pitches per start. Anyway watch some baseball

*Also I don't care about HFA through the playoffs.  Things happen.