Major League Baseball’s trade deadline is in the rearview mirror, and with it, the stretch run begins. Nine teams have waved the white flag, but 21 continue to compete, and to offer a complete picture, FanGraphs is still showing better than a 1–in–2,000 chance of making the playoffs for four of the nine which have surrendered (Mets: 1–in–18, Tigers: 1–in–71, Cardinals: 1–in–167, Pirates: 1–in–333). Elsewhere in the landscape, we’re down to five World Series contenders, rather than six. The Blue Jays didn’t do a whole lot at the deadline, and they’ve lost three straight, and with the Astros adding back the reigning Cy Young winner, that’s pushed Toronto back under our 5.0% threshold above which we use that label.
We’ve talked a lot about what each team should be expected to do from here. As a refresher: The Braves, Dodgers, Rays, Astros, and Rangers are the contenders. The Orioles, Twins, Rangers, Phillies, Giants, Brewers, Blue Jays, Marlins, Padres, Reds, Diamondbacks, Red Sox, Cubs, Guardians, Yankees, Mariners, and Angels remain factors, hanging around the playoff mix. These are our 21 characters starting out the rest of the story. What we’re going to talk about today is what constitutes a happy ending for each.
There are five thresholds here, in theory: The baseline (avoiding an epic collapse) plus one for reaching each tier in the playoff ladder, minus one because reaching the Division Series isn’t all that different from just making the playoffs in the first place. We’re only offering our impressions—obviously, sentiments will differ within each franchise and within its fanbase, but we’re trying to guess at what would make most semi-reasonable fans say, “Ok, that was a good season.”
World Series Title or Bust: Braves
This is a hard space to occupy, that of expecting a title in baseball. Never, probably not since 1927 or so, does a team enter the MLB playoffs with anywhere near a 50% chance of winning the World Series. Still, Atlanta fans expect a title this year, and they’re right to expect one. The Braves are far and away the best team in baseball, and that’s been clear since April for anyone paying any kind of attention. They didn’t just win one, they aren’t reloading, and the sting of only winning one in the 90s, the last time they were this good for this long, is fresh and relevant. If the Braves win the NLCS but lose in the World Series, it’s not only going to hurt as an absence of revelry. It’s going to be an active disappointment.
Pennant or Bust: Yankees, Dodgers
The Yankees would be in the World Series Title or Bust category if they hadn’t already dug themselves such an impressive hole. At this point, if the Yankees put it together and reach the World Series for the first time since 2009, it’ll have been a successful year. It’s funny how that works. If the Yankees turn it around and don’t make the World Series, though, it’ll have been disappointing. When you’ve made five Championship Series in thirteen years and lost all five, that’s how it goes.
Also in this category are the Dodgers. I suspect a lot of Dodgers fans rightfully think of this as a rebuilding year, and are laughing quietly to themselves at how good they have it that a rebuilding year leaves them as one of the best teams in baseball on paper, especially while those cocky Padres down the road (their words, not mine, but…you know) remain under .500 as children in California get ready to go back to school. Still, there’s a good chance that if the Dodgers make the NLCS, they’ll run into the Braves, and this would constitute a rubber match between the two on the heels of 2020 and 2021. The Dodgers want to be kings of the NL right now, if not kings of baseball as a whole. This is a chance to assert that.
LCS Appearance or Bust: Rays, Rangers, Astros, Twins, Padres, Blue Jays, Brewers
This is a long list, made up mostly of teams with recent playoff appearances and accompanying expectations but not enough success so as to demand a place on the final stage. I would say the Rays, Twins, Padres, Blue Jays, and Brewers each fit this description. If any of those teams make the playoffs but bow out in the LDS or the Wild Card Series, that’s failure.
The others are a little different.
The Astros are the reigning champions, but there is no expectation in baseball right now to repeat, and the Astros have been reloading, taking a step backwards this year in order to retool, just like the Dodgers. Having won the last two ALCS and having won three of the last four (and four of the last six), Houston doesn’t gain a ton by winning this one. They have more recent rings than anybody, the only team with multiple World Series titles since the Giants stopped winning every other year. They would obviously prefer to win it all, and they’ll be sad if they lose, but so long as they win the ALDS, playing to their likeliest seed, it’s not been a bad year. Outlasting the Rangers, Yankees, and maybe the Red Sox at this point is probably their baseline emotional goal.
The Rangers are new to the party, but having briefly taken control of the West, they now cannot afford to lose it, especially after pushing so many chips to the center of the table at the trade deadline and especially after last week’s conflagration with the Astros. Expectations for sports fans are like blood for sharks. Once you’ve had a taste, it’s hard to let go.
Playoffs or Bust: Orioles, Phillies, Angels, Cubs, Red Sox, Giants, Mariners
These are mostly alike and are simultaneously all a little bit different. Let’s start with the Phillies, the most unusual of the seven.
The Phillies made the World Series last year and didn’t win it, but their making the World Series was so surprising and their return to relevance was so new (it was their first playoff appearance since 2011) that it was probably enough to satiate the masses for a year, strange as that may seem to say about Philadelphia (it’s an Eagles town, after all). That said, if they miss the playoffs with this roster, after adding Trea Turner, people are going to be justifiably pissed. Especially with the Mets lying dead on the shoulder on the way to the Shore.
The Orioles are in that beautiful space called “on the rise.” Their farm system is loaded, their Major League team is good, they keep calling up delightful baseball players with unique, narrowly–not–bothersome names. Life is good right now for the Orioles, good enough that even the messiest ownership situation in Major League Baseball is a faint cirrus cloud in the Baltimore sky. They do need to make the playoffs, anything less will mean they’ve collapsed, but just getting playoff baseball back, ideally at Camden Yards (maybe getting a home game should’ve been its own tier), will be enough.
The Red Sox and Giants and—congratulations, guys—the Mariners are in a space where the season isn’t as bad as they feared. The Mariners are a little different here, and we’ll get to them in a moment, but after the Giants whiffed so dramatically on both Aaron Judge and Carlos Correa this offseason while the media dragged Red Sox president Chaim Bloom across those spike strips cops use during car chases, the fact either is in the playoff picture is pleasant for both. They do need to make it, though. Each franchise has stature enough that if what’s happening isn’t an explicit rebuild, a playoff appearance is necessary.
For the Mariners, the reasonable expectation after 2021’s magical near-miss and 2022’s magical playoff journey was to fall on their face. Both those seasons were magical. It’s hard to replicate magic. Of course, this wasn’t the common expectation, but things have gone mediocrely enough that at this point, making the playoffs would be kind of nice for Seattle. Missing it, however, would probably make many frustrated, especially with Jerry Dipoto doing a classic Jerry Dipoto deadline in which he neither fully bought nor fully sold. (I said yesterday they mostly sold, but I don’t think this is accurate after looking more closely at the Paul Sewald trade. I think it was a hold, or a reshape if you’ll allow me to compare this to laundering sweaters.)
That leaves the Angels and the Cubs, two teams who dramatically decided to buy at the deadline, the Angels by throwing caution to the wind and following their heart and the Cubs by winning so much their front office had no choice. The thing with those decisions, unfortunately for realists, is that the decision to buy was not enough. The Angels need to get Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani to the playoffs. Having the best player of a generation should mean constant playoff appearances. Having both of them makes it imperative to finally get back there. The Cubs, meanwhile, set expectations so high for themselves this offseason that they’re only just now getting to the spot where they’re meeting them, and they sit in the awkward position of being big brother in the division relative to the two teams they’re chasing. Much like the Giants and Red Sox, once it isn’t an active rebuild, they need to beat little brother. Little brother, in this case, is both the Brewers and the Reds.
Happy to Hang Around: Reds, Diamondbacks, Marlins, Guardians
The Reds, Diamondbacks, and Marlins are and should be happy to be here. They’re each “a year early,” the spot where the Orioles were last year. None of the three are a premier franchise, none are big brother, none reached such a high height at their 2023 peak (to date) that championships became more likely than not. The Diamondbacks have at no point been the NL West favorite, by my recollection. As long as these teams finish above .500, it’ll have been a good year.
For the Guardians, the situation is different because the playoff threshold is so low. FanGraphs currently thinks it would only take 84 wins to best the Twins. With last year being so fun and with the Guardians suffering the longest World Series drought in the sport, one way to describe the calculus here is to say that since the World Series is basically off the table, and since the World Series is the only thing that would really change this franchise’s recent trophy case, the difference in enjoyment between making the playoffs and missing them is relatively negligible, and since making the playoffs is presently unlikely, that means as long as what follows isn’t painful, the season is fine right here.
**
Again, individuals within these ecosystems probably disagree with us. This is where we see it from afar.
One other observation? It seems the success vs. failure threshold often lies one rung above the ladder from hitting the median expectation.
Is the Big Ten a Charity?
Yahoo published a report today, and it was confirmed by The Athletic, that a group of roughly (or maybe exactly) a quarter of Big Ten presidents have met to begin discussing adding Washington and Oregon, and possibly Stanford and Cal. I will say this about the report: Dan Wetzel is the reporter, and I personally find a lot of Dan Wetzel’s work to be clickbait. So, I’m probably biased here. (Update: This is very embarrassing, but I may have confused Dan Wetzel and Dan Wolken. I think I find both to be clickbait guys but I definitely had them conflated, and I am way less sure about Wetzel. So, to err on the safe side, apologies to Wetzel. I will pay more attention and not make this mistake anymore.) I’m seeing nothing from ESPN yet on the subject, as of 3:00 PM CT. The Athletic—which has leaned heavily into clickbait with its conference realignment coverage—only put the story on its own college football front page once the Yahoo piece picked up steam, hilariously pushing a “Should the ACC and the Pac-12 merge?” mental masturbation exercise to the back page at the same time. (That one was by Stewart Mandel, who is like Dan Wetzel but with malice.)
Wetzel’s piece is half-opinion, half-report, interjecting claims like, “The Big Ten’s thinking…” while ostensibly reporting on movement by just four university presidents, not necessarily a sample representative of the league as a whole. He claims the Big Ten has “hesitancy to deliver the final destructive blow to the Pac-12,” as though the Big Ten didn’t just add USC and UCLA a summer ago and start a predictable chain of dominos in motion. It says Oregon and Washington have “excellent fan bases and markets in Portland and Seattle,” a subjective claim which raises eyebrows for those who follow attendance numbers or have watched a Pac-12 game in the last five years. It concludes with, “Then there is Notre Dame, a proud independent who could finally feel pushed to join a league full-time.”
It’s a think piece without the thought.
Notre Dame, for reasons we enumerated Friday and Monday, is not going to join a conference simply because conferences are changing membership. If it were going to do that, Notre Dame would have been in the Big Ten when Penn State joined. There is no connection to Notre Dame here other than the fact that Yahoo will get more pageviews if Google News harvests the piece in its “Notre Dame realignment” search collection (a search term that is *buzzing* these days).
The Big Ten examined Washington and Oregon last summer and, per multiple reports, found adding the pair would lead to a decrease in revenue per school from the media rights deal, something which has again and again been a budget-driven non-starter for schools these last few years. The Bay Area is a larger market than Seattle (and Seattle is larger than Portland), but as with the Pacific Northwest schools: If the Big Ten would make more money by adding Stanford and Cal, it would have done so last summer when it added USC and UCLA. It’s hard to believe the economics have changed over the last thirteen months.
I share Wetzel’s impression that Oregon, Washington, Stanford, and Cal are Big Ten-style schools. There are shared values there, and I do believe that what we’re seeing in the long run with conference realignment is alignment by ideology, not dissimilar to what we see sociopolitically in the “culture war.” But just because schools should be friends doesn’t mean they’ll automatically join one another in a conference. Eventually, I would be surprised if Oregon, Washington, and Stanford don’t ultimately find their way to the Big Ten, but right now? We’ve yet to see a conference add a school that makes existing members make less money.
With it unlikely the Big Ten’s current TV deal is bettered by adding four aggregately mediocre football programs with small to medium fanbases by power conference standards, each located in a media market smaller than that occupied by Boston College, that leaves three reasons the Big Ten could add these two or four schools:
The first is that the Big Ten fears not being able to get these schools later if it doesn’t take them now. If streaming does continue to take over a larger share of media money from cable and network television, geographic markets should matter less and sheer fan interest should matter more, which would be a major improvement in the rubric for a school like Oregon. The Big Ten might want these schools in 2030, and it might fear these schools locking themselves into the Big 12, ACC, or—this is the big one—the SEC and foreclosing the possibility of future Big Ten membership. If this is an arms race (we once called it Mutually Assured Expansion), then there is value in stopping a brand from going to a rival league.
The second is that the Big Ten decides active investment in these four brands is worthwhile. The concern with the Pac-12’s proposed deal is that spending five or six years playing football on a subscription-only TV package available solely through Apple TV will weaken Washington and Oregon (and Stanford and Cal) substantially. There’s an argument to be made that if the Big Ten doesn’t take these schools now, they won’t be valuable enough to be worthwhile in 2030, all while presumed eventual SEC targets—Florida State, Clemson, Baylor, TCU—continue to improve their own value. It’s a twist on the first concern, and summarized, it says the Big Ten should buy the house now so the house doesn’t burn down before they can get it, even if they’re getting it at a bad price.
The third is that the Big Ten feels guilty enough about these two or four schools falling into the mid-major world that it is willing to pay some amount of money, presumably a million or more dollars per school per year, to prevent that from happening. This seems to be Wetzel’s thought, or what’s being presented as thought. This is what’s so hard to see happening. Why in the world would Illinois open its checkbook to save Washington? Why would Iowa step in to bail out Cal? And that’s without mentioning that the old geographic concern—the thing that makes UCLA and USC uncomfortable for these Big Ten schools, the fact they’ll be sending softball players across the country on a school night once a year—would double or triple in this proposed arrangement.
To Wetzel’s credit, he does mention that “part of the decision will be based on whether…broadcast partners are willing to offer a pro rata share – or something close.” (“Pro rata” is the new sexy phrase these self-perceived pixel-stained wretches are using to make it seem like they know everything and we know nothing and we the people must eat our information from their beneficent hands. All it means is that each existing member’s revenue wouldn’t change based on the addition of the new member in question.) But Wetzel mentions this as an afterthought when it’s the central piece of the story. I don’t care if, I don’t know, UCLA and USC and Michigan and Illinois’s presidents got together and said, “Ok, let’s at least do our due diligence on Washington and Oregon.” Either every force which has driven realignment this cycle is changing, or the Big Ten isn’t adding Oregon. I’m going to bet on the latter.
Our other realignment news for the day:
Dennis Dodd at CBS mentioned a number on the Pac-12 deal, saying it’s coming in at about two thirds the revenue per school of what the Big 12 is making.
Ross Dellenger at Yahoo published a strong comprehensive account of realignment last night which includes a report that the ACC is not interested in adding any West Coast schools. For Washingtonian optimists, there’s a window in the wording which can let you believe that Dellenger’s sources are referring to the full Pac-12/ACC merger idea, and that if it were only Washington and Oregon, or if it were Washington and Oregon and Stanford and Cal, it might work, but Dellenger seems to present it as meaning no ACC expansion is on its way. Which, again, brings us back to how silly a notion it is that Washington and Oregon could be valuable for a rich Big Ten and not valuable for a middle-class ACC.
Dellenger’s report also makes clear that the Big 12 declined the Pac-12 merger last summer, not the other way around.
UPDATE: ESPN is now reporting that Washington and Oregon would be willing to join the Big Ten at a partial revenue share, making less than Rutgers and Maryland and the rest of the league for the remainder of the current Big Ten media deal. This would obviously change the calculus on the Big Ten. It would also be smart of Washington and Oregon.
Hunter Dekkers, Big Dumb Idiot
This is a sad story, seeming to be one of those instances where a college kid does something phenomenally stupid and his parents panic and try to cover for him. I feel bad for the Dekkers family, and for the Blom family over at Iowa, and for all the other families dealing with the fact their kids placed small-dollar bets on their own college football teams, something kind of like accidentally bringing a legally registered firearm to an airport. No, Iowa State (backup at the time) quarterback Hunter Dekkers wasn’t trying to throw games. We don’t even have reports as to which team he bet on. But he is alleged to have bet on an Iowa State football game while on the roster, he’s alleged to have bet on Iowa State games in sports other than football while a member of the ISU athletic department, and he’s alleged to have bet underage. He and his family are also alleged to have falsified records, something that’s been reported to be an effort in a scheme to claim his mom was the one placing the bets and was using his account.
To be honest, if there’s one person who comes out looking especially bad in this mess, it’s Matt Campbell. For as well-run as the Iowa State football program seems to be, and with effective program management such a strength on Matt Campbell’s résumé, this is at some level a failure to make clear how absolutely black and white it is that while you are a college athlete, you cannot bet on sports. Any sports. It doesn’t matter which are and aren’t allowed. Just don’t bet on sports while you are actively playing them yourself. It’s not worth it, and it’s not hard to not do it. If you are going to do it, do not bet on college sports. If you are going to bet on college sports, do not bet on games involving your own school. If you are going to bet on games involving your own school, do not bet on your own sport. Matt Campbell’s program let Hunter Dekkers and a few other athletes get five steps further into the hole than they ever should have gotten, and that’s disappointing.
Thankfully, for as physically gifted as he is, Dekkers did not look great at quarterback last fall for the Cyclones, so assuming this teaches the lesson and rids the ISU program of betting, and assuming that those alleged to have committed violations are merely suspended and not kicked out of college sports, this might work out fine in the long run. For now, the three options at quarterback for Iowa State are sophomore Rocco Becht, freshman J.J. Kohl, and junior college transfer Tanner Hughes. Hughes has the experience advantage, having played well last year at Butte College, which famously produced Aaron Rodgers. Becht has the familiarity advantage, having served as Dekkers’s backup last year. Kohl has the potential advantage, standing 6’7” and coming in as four-star recruit, which is high for Iowa State, even under Campbell.
Last bit on this for today: For those who wondered with us whether Eyioma Uwazurike’s gambling suspension was tied at all to his time at Iowa State, he’s included in the Story County complaint. So, yes. Yes he was. He allegedly bet on two Iowa State games while on the team.
