Tipsheet: Mets, Braves reconvene Monday to decide NL wild card berths

While the Cardinals begin their much-anticipated organizational reset, the more successful teams are preparing for postseason play.

Oh, and there is this: The expansion of baseball's playoff bracket and Hurricane Helene rain created a manic Monday for the New York Mets, Atlanta Braves and Arizona Diamondbacks.

Two of those three teams will earn a wild card berth and one will just miss.

"We put ourselves in this position," Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor told reporters after New York blanked the Milwaukee Brewers 5-0 Sunday to edge a step closer to the bracket. "It could have been way worse. We are in a position where we are fighting for what we want. We want to be in the postseason and it's a good spot to be in."

The Braves could have clinched a postseason by winning Sunday, but they lost to the upstart Kansas City Royals 4-2 Sunday. So now they trudge on to their makeup doubleheader against the Mets.

"We've got a chance to make the postseason," Braves first baseman Matt Olson said Sunday. "It's the same as any day, we've got to show up and win tomorrow. Obviously, you would have wanted to do it today and take an easier route tomorrow."

Writing for CBSSports.com , Mike Axisa sums up the doubleheader scenario for the Mets and Braves:

The Braves and Mets control their own destinies. One win and they're in. And since the Braves and Mets both go into Monday's doubleheader needing just one win, why not agree to forfeits? One team forfeits the first game, the other team forfeits the second, and you're both in the postseason without burning through your pitching before the Wild Card Series. Smart, right?

That won't happen, of course. Commissioner Rob Manfred would, presumably, invoke the commissioner's "best interests of baseball" authority to make the Braves and Mets play Monday to avoid the farce of two teams clinching postseason berths via forfeits. Whichever team wins Game 1 of the doubleheader will have no incentive to play hard in Game 2 though.

And that is bad news for the D-backs, who need one team to win both games Monday. Doesn't matter which team. They need a sweep to get in, otherwise their season is over. The first game Monday will start at 1:10 p.m. ET. The second game will start approximately 40 minutes after the first game ends. Fun fun fun.

Odds are, whichever team wins Game 1 of the doubleheader will play scrubs in Game 2 to avoid wear-and-tear ahead of the playoffs. That is bad news for the Diamondbacks, who extended their mathematical life by pounding the San Diego Padres 11-2 Sunday.

"I might not even watch the first game," Diamondbacks outfielder Jake McCarthy told reporters. "It's just all about the second one. It's either going to be really fun or it's going to be awful, but it's definitely unique. Like the season's over, and we still don't know if we're in the playoffs or not. It's definitely not a common situation to be in."

Yeah, well, it beats hitting the reset button while your ownership slashes payroll . . .

TALKIN' BASEBALL

Here is what folks have been writing about Our National Pastime.

Bob Nightengale, USA Today: "The St. Louis Cardinals, who will announce a series of personnel moves on Monday with Chaim Bloom taking on a greater role, plan to shop veteran starter Sonny Gray while reducing payroll. Gray, who signed a three-year, $75 million contract last winter, has a full no-trade clause, with the Cincinnati Reds expected to be among the teams aggressively pursuing him . . . Skip Schumaker, who officially informed the Marlins and his players that he had no interest in returning before departing Friday for a family emergency, is the No. 1 target of the Cincinnati Reds. Former Cubs manager David Ross also is expected to be interviewed . . . It's time that Carlos Beltran, a special assistant with the New York Mets, receives interviews from teams seeking a manager. He'd be a good fit with the White Sox if they don't retain Grady Sizemore."

Brittany Ghiroli, The Athletic: "These are the new Royals. On Friday, Kansas City clinched its first playoff spot in nearly a decade, and just its third in 37 years. The team has won nearly 30 games more than it did last year, a franchise record for year-to-year improvement. It is the first team (J.J) Picollo truly engineered. The organization underwent a significant offseason reshaping before they even signed a player, hiring a new scouting director (Brian Bridges), promoting Jim Cuthbert (director of pro personnel and strategy) and Daniel Guerrero (international scouting director) and investing in new technology. As they turned over a third of the big-league roster, the Royals also hired six people in research and development, including Pete Berryman, who travels with the team as a major-league analyst, and a new R&D director, Christine Harris. Picollo, who hired Quatraro from the analytically-minded Rays, wanted someone who would challenge the status quo. And Quatraro and his staff — which includes bench coach Paul Hoover (also from the Rays) and Sweeney (Cleveland Guardians) — made it clear last season that the Royals' analytics needed work . . . In a January Zoom call, while other organizations were just starting their meetings, each Royals department presented their ideas and a plan of attack. There were new players to discuss, new data models to integrate, new technology and ideas on how to blend improved scouting and analytics. There was an unmatched fervor heading into spring training.This is how you change a culture from the inside out. This is how the Kansas City Royals became one of baseball's biggest surprises."

David Laurila, FanGraphs: "The Detroit Tigers have been baseball's hottest team, rattling off 31 wins in 43 games to go from eight games under .500 to 11 games over and into the postseason for the first time in a decade. That they've done so is nothing short of remarkable. Not only were most outside expectations relatively low coming into the campaign, the A.J. Hinch-led team has dominated September with a starting staff largely comprising of Tarik Skubal, unheralded rookie Keider Montero, and an array of openers. On the season, Detroit Tigers starters have thrown 748-and-a-third innings, the fewest in the majors (notably with a 3.66 ERA, fourth best in the majors). There is obviously more to why the Tigers have emerged as a surprise team — not to mention a legitimate postseason contender — than the presence of an ace left-hander and Hinch's expertise in mixing and matching starters and relievers."

R.J. Anderson, CBSSports.com : "(Farhan) Zaidi appeared to be on the hot seat around this time last year. He was spared, signing an extension through 2026 while ditching manager Gabe Kapler for Bob Melvin. Zaidi was then afforded the highest payroll in franchise history, only to deliver another losing season. Add in recent reports about how Buster Posey, not Zaidi, served as the accelerant to get an extension done with Matt Chapman, and you can understand why the industry has been whispering for a few weeks now about potential replacements in San Francisco. We're inclined to think a change is coming - for as good of a hire as Zaidi seemed to be in 2019, it's hard to look at the rosters he's built over his time in charge of the Giants and declare that he's delivered on his promise."

Ray Ratto, The Defector: "The Angels are a White Sox-level dumpster conflagration, only with slightly different fuel. Not only did they assemble their worst season ever, but it felt every bot as bad as it was the whole time. The team was drab, unaccomplished, and listless on a daily basis, and has been aired out by manager Ron Washington in increasingly urgent and florid ways. 'We forgot to bring real ballplayers into the organization,' Wash earlier this week. 'Nothing against these guys here but they're not big-league baseball players.' While Washington later said he misspoke (and truth often turns into misspeaking with an hour's reflection and one sternly written text from on high), he wasn't really wrong. He and the players around him spent this year losing in the dullest possible ways, all as their previous best player ever does sport-bending things only 31 miles up the road and their previous-previous best player ever missed almost all of the season with a slowly decomposing body. There will not be another Shohei Ohtani for the Angels, and quite probably not another Mike Trout either. This is true of most other franchises in baseball, too, but help is not on the way, here. The Angels have gone to this new realization cold turkey—frozen, supermarket-quality turkey. Thus, getting swept by a team who was actually a month's worth of losses worse than them when the series began is in its own way a worst-ever moment. The White Sox have been so galactically from the very start of the year that it became easy to forget the other terrible teams littering the bottom of the standings, like Miami, Colorado and Washington; we'd include the new West Sacramento franchise here, but they have some entertaining bombers who might go completely stats-nuts in their new flash-fried minipark. And we definitely forgot the Angels. It can sometimes seem like that was the whole idea, because they have been so devoutly camouflaged from notice for so long. Even the Ohtani-Trout combination, which should have lit up the sky and led us toward a cultural renaissance for the sport, ended up almost 70 games below .500 in their six seasons together. The Rangers and Nationals, who were even worse, got rings. The Angels, as is the custom, got nothing."

Patrick Dubuque, Baseball Prospecutus: "The White Sox are artistic disasters, baseball's equivalent of The Room; the Angels are startlingly offensive, the Marlins callous and bone dry, the Athletics tragic. The Rockies, meanwhile, hurt no one. They do not, like seemingly everyone else involved in baseball, tear at the fabric of the sport in one direction or another. They simply exist, self-sufficient and harmonious, content to be themselves forever. That's the irony of all of this: There is no insanity in Denver, except the inherent madness of expectations, the human suffering of wanting something other than what is. Years ago in an old Annual I compared the Rockies to a spiritual exercise, and they remain so: An infinite number of meaningless seasons, ticking down an infinite number of peaceful summer nights, an infinite number of friends and parents and children throwing away the hours being entertained, as an infinite number of Charlie Blackmons tip their caps. It's all so perfect, by one very specific definition of perfection. And the best part of it all is that you don't even need to watch it to know that it'll be there. Rockies baseball will always be there, hovering in the background, a set piece for your real life. Never demanding your attention, never pretending to be anything more than it is. Useless, valueless, and comforting."

"He gave us the confidence to change our whole mentality. What Skip did last year was a lot different than the many years I've been here. Everything changed, the culture, the environment in the locker room. We were more together."

Marlins pitcher Sandy Alcantara, on former Miami Manager Skip Schumaker.

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