Wait, what's that you say - you missed it? Most likely the greatest single night of regular season baseball in our lifetime and you missed it? Well, sit right down and listen up, because not only are the boys of summer defying Mother Nature and still playing, they're making history while doing it.
Last Wednesday night, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Tampa Bay Rays punched their tickets into the MLB postseason with wins against the Houston Astros and New York Yankees, respectively. By itself, this turn of events hardly constitutes a newsworthy story as both squads are talented teams with recent playoff experience. What makes the story, however, is that as of Sept. 3, neither team had more than a 3.9 percent chance of doing so. The Rays were even in greater dire straits than that with only a 0.5 percent chance of making the playoffs, according to coolstandings.com, a website that simulates millions of games to determine the likelihood of particular outcomes. On that day, little more than a month ago, the Cardinals trailed the Atlanta Braves by 7.5 games in the standings, and the Rays were barely within shouting distance of the Boston Red Sox, who looked poised to walk into October with a commanding nine-game lead in the chase. It looked like it was only a matter of time until the Sox and the Braves were spraying champagne, celebrating their trips to the postseason.
But baseball is a funny game at times. The Braves and the Red Sox stopped winning, and the Cardinals and the Rays developed an allergic reaction to losing. Leads once thought insurmountable began to crumble like a house of cards against a strong wind. Pressure began to mount, and before you knew it, we arrived at Wednesday night - with both wild card races tied at the top and one game left to decide who would go on to play in the divisional series and who would start making tee times in Florida.
Often times, sports provide us with these moments only to tease us and deny us the climactic ending we all want to see. Think the 2010 NCAA Tournament when Butler, the little engine that could, rode momentum all the way to the finals against heavily-favored Duke only to see its hopes drop as Gordon Hayward's shot hit the rim and fell harmlessly to the floor. Until two outs in the ninth inning, Wednesday seemed destined to end the same way. Both Boston and Atlanta were one strike away from winning, and while St. Louis had already won to force Atlanta to a game 163, the Rays were one strike away from losing to the New York Yankees and making their improbable run all for naught.
But then, strange things started to happen: a hit here and a home run there, and suddenly the feeling was back. Boston's closer, Jonathan Papelbon, suddenly lost effectiveness, and after a Nolan Reimold double to tie the score, the stage was set for Robert Andino to rip a single to left that just missed outfielder Carl Crawford's glove and give the Orioles the win. Hundreds of miles down I-95, the Rays' Dan Johnson had homered with two outs and two strikes in the ninth to force extras, and Evan Longoria snuck a long ball just inside the left-field foul pole to win it for the Rays. Meanwhile, in Atlanta, 45,000 fans were left in shock as the Phillies climbed back from a 3-1 deficit to win it on a Hunter Pence single during the 13th inning. And just like that, the collapses were complete - the Cardinals and Rays were going on, and the Braves and the Sox were going home.
On one night, the baseball world had indeed turned upside down. The numbers, something sabermetricians and Moneyball advocates had been pushing on us all for years as the be-all and end-all of prognostication, had lied. On Sept. 3, the Rays had a 0.5 percent chance of making the playoffs - 0.5 percent! That means if you simulated the season 100 times, the Rays would make the playoffs once at the most - it simply was not supposed to happen. Well, somebody must have forgotten to tell that to Tampa Bay.
There's an old adage in sports that says if you take care of your business, the rest will figure itself out. The Rays and the Cardinals kept taking care of their business, and let the pressure overwhelm the teams above them. That's why they don't play games on paper, and that's why they never stop the season early. On Sept. 3, the script looked written, and I wouldn't have blamed you for not watching Wednesday night. But if we learned anything from that day, it's another reminder that the beauty of sports is that they don't always follow the script. Sometimes the amazing happens, and all we can do is make sure we're watching when it does.
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