If you’re looking for pennant race drama as baseball gets closer to the playoffs, there’s one state that seems to be at the center of it: California.
The San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Dodgers are battling for a division title, with the loser hosting the Wild Card Game. Meanwhile, the San Diego Padres have endured a bumpy second half and the Oakland A’s find themselves chasing a pair of east coast teams in big markets.
Let’s start with the latest chapter in the rich history of the Giants-Dodgers rivalry.
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Everyone expected the Dodgers to be in this position but I don’t quite think that’s true for the Giants. The Opening Day projections from Fangraphs gave the Dodgers a 98.4 percent chance to make the playoffs, while the Giants sat at just a 5.7 percent chance. Even as the Giants started the year strong, the math was still skeptical, not giving San Francisco a 50 percent chance of making the playoffs until May 30. However, the Giants continued to win and now there is a 100 percent chance the Giants make the playoffs, an increase of 94.3 percentage points from Opening Day.
In June, I wrote about how the Giants were enjoying success from Buster Posey, Brandon Crawford and Kevin Gausman and all of that has continued. So this time, I want to focus on another player who has enjoyed an unexpected big year in the Bay Area.
Darin Ruf posted a .747 OPS across five seasons with the Philadelphia Phillies and then wound up enjoying three productive seasons in Korea. With the Samsung Lions, he had a .968 OPS in over 400 games, returning to America in 2020 with the Giants. He had a .887 OPS across just 100 PAs in the pandemic season, which was an encouraging sign but certainly nothing you would’ve felt confident counting on entering 2021, but here we are.
Ruf has a .940 OPS in his first full season in America since 2016 and he’s doing this as a 35-year-old. Ruf’s 245 PAs aren’t enough to qualify for the leaderboards, but if you lower the threshold to 240 PAs, his OPS ranks ninth in baseball.
Players like Posey, Crawford and Gausman are surprises this year but they hardly compare to the 35-year-old KBO veteran having an excellent season.
While the Giants are summoning 35-year-olds from KBO to crush the ball, the Dodgers are getting reliable production from people you’d expect. Max Muncy has a .932 OPS and Walker Buehler’s ERA is just a hair above 2.00. Cody Bellinger is having an inexplicable dropoff with a .566 OPS, but the talent elsewhere on the LA roster means his dreadful year won’t impact them too much.
The Giants lead by 1.5 games entering Tuesday’s games and only have three games left against the Dodgers, so another division title in LA will likely hinge on them outplaying San Francisco without many head-to-head meetings.
The Dodgers and Giants both have nine games remaining against the weaker Arizona Diamondbacks and Colorado Rockies, but the Giants also have a series against the dreadful post-deadline Chicago Cubs that the Dodgers won’t get to enjoy. A sweep at Wrigley Field from September 10 to September 12 could be pivotal for San Francisco avoiding the Wild Card Game.
Regardless of who wins the division, both of these teams know they’ve clinched at least one home game in the postseason. The same can’t be said for the third contender in their division and state.
The Padres are 17-22 in the second half and while there’s plenty of areas of concern, trade deadline acquisition Adam Frazier sticks out like a sore thumb. After producing a .836 OPS as a Pittsburgh Pirate, he has rapidly declined with a .538 OPS out west. His on-base percentage is higher than his slugging percentage, which is never good.
Making matters worse for San Diego is that the schedule does not get easy from here. They play the Giants ten times, the Dodgers six times and just for fun, they also have an interleague series with the Houston Astros looming. Meanwhile, the Cincinnati Reds lead the Padres by 0.5 games and have a much weaker schedule that includes nine games with the Pirates and a trio of games with the aforementioned post-deadline ghost of the Cubs. There’s still excellent talent on the Padres roster so they’re hardly dead, but they’ll need stars like Manny Machado to get big hits in big games.
Of course, we can’t let the NL have all the fun here. Over in Oakland, the A’s are trying to do what they seemingly always do: let key players leave in free agency without skipping a beat. Liam Hendriks is part of the bullpen that will help the Chicago White Sox win the AL Central, while Marcus Semien has an OPS over .800 with the Toronto Blue Jays.
So far the departures haven’t provided much of a dent, with Oakland 2.0 games behind for the wild card entering Tuesday’s slate. The A’s can also feel encouraged knowing they stopped an impressive winning streak from the Yankees, splitting a 4-game weekend set in the Bay Area by winning the final two meetings.
The A’s are currently chasing the Boston Red Sox but already finished playing them, so they’ll be hoping Boston’s nine remaining meetings with the Yankees and Rays go poorly to open the door. Regardless of the outcome, it remains impressive that the A’s continue to remain playoff contenders when their stars leave in free agency almost twenty years after Michael Lewis wrote a book about the organization’s philosophy.
There are five teams in California and only the Los Angeles Angels don’t have a chance at the postseason this year. It should be an exciting September for baseball out west.
BSL Analyst
Rose Katz is a recent graduate of the University of Maryland’s journalism school, where she worked for The Diamondback as the online managing editor and a sports blogger. As a student, she spent almost all of her time on campus in The Diamondback’s newsroom or at Xfinity Center, Ludwig Field and Maryland Stadium. Rose gained intern experience with the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN).