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How was that for a scintillating Sunday? There was tense action almost everywhere (12 of 16 games decided by one or two runs), except at Fenway Park, where the Red Sox scored a Twin-bill beatdown to knock Minnesota out of a playoff position. The Twins, Mariners and Braves all stand a game or two out with six to play, so it should be a wild week.
I’m Tyler Kepner — pinch-hitting for Levi Weaver — with Ken Rosenthal, and welcome to The Windup!
While You Were Sleeping: With progress stalled, Reds fire manager
Next season will mark an anniversary that nobody in Cincinnati will celebrate: 30 years since the Reds’ last playoff series victory. Manager David Bell had six seasons to try to stop that streak, but the team announced last night that there won’t be a seventh.
“We have not achieved the success we expected,” GM Nick Krall said in a statement, “and we need to begin focusing on 2025.”
Bell was fired with five games to go in the regular season, replaced by bench coach Freddie Benavides on an interim basis. Bell was 409-456 and reached the playoffs just once, in the expanded format in 2020, when the team was 31-29. He was signed through 2026.
C. Trent Rosecrans has the story.
On a personal level, I’ve known Bell since covering him with the Mariners in the late 1990s. Trust me: you won’t find a more caring, classier person in the game. His next team will be very lucky to have him.
62 Years Later: White Sox dust off an old standard of futility
One of my favorite things about September baseball is learning which numbers we’ll remember forever. Shohei Ohtani is up to 53 homers, his latest a game-tying blast yesterday that set up Mookie Betts’ walk-off for the Dodgers. Up the coast in Oakland, the Yankees’ Aaron Judge belted homer No. 55. And down the coast, at Petco Park in San Diego, we saw the White Sox unearth a number unseen in 62 years: 120 losses.
- The Padres came back in the eighth inning to win, 4-2, giving the sorry Sox their 120th defeat, tying the modern record.
- The final blow only added to the humiliation: It was a homer by Fernando Tatis Jr., notoriously traded by the White Sox, at age 17, for a fading James Shields.
The last time a team lost its 120th game was Sept. 30, 1962, when the expansion Mets dropped their season finale to the Cubs. Their Hall of Fame leadoff man, Richie Ashburn, singled that day in the final at-bat of his career — and was promptly erased on the bases as part of a triple play.
Ashburn was soon named team MVP and given a boat to mark the achievement. Its fate would be the final line of his New York Times obituary in 1997:
“After the season ended, I docked the boat in Ocean City, N.J.,” Ashburn said, “and it sank.”
The 2024 White Sox, it seems, will not inspire such colorful, embraceable tales of woe (although their social media team is having some laugh-so-you-don’t-cry kind of fun). They’ll host the Angels and then visit Detroit to end a thoroughly dispiriting campaign. We’ll find out that final, inglorious loss total very soon.
Read more from Sam Blum on the scene in San Diego as the White Sox hit a new low.
Ken’s Notebook: Apologies for the stunning collapses
I shouldn’t have opened my big mouth. And I did it twice.
Last Monday, on my YouTube show and podcast, “Fair Territory,” I proclaimed that only one postseason berth was still in question — the one between the Braves and Mets for the final National League wild-card spot.
Tigers fans took offense in the YouTube comment section. Mariners fans did, too. At the time, two weeks remained in the regular season. The Royals led the Twins by 2 1/2 games for the second AL wild-card berth. The Twins led both the Tigers and Mariners by 2 1/2 games for the third.
The Twins hold the tiebreaker over both those clubs, so I did not believe my comment was terribly outrageous. As I remember, I qualified it by saying, “barring a collapse,” or something to that effect. But by the time I did my second show of the week, on Thursday, the Tigers had closed to within a half-game of the Twins and two games of the Royals. I did a mea culpa for Tigers fans, but haughtily advised Mariners fans to “pipe down,” seeing as how their team was still 2 1/2 games behind the Tigers.
Alas, I failed to recognize that dueling collapses were taking place.
On Aug. 27, the Royals were tied with the Guardians for the AL Central lead. Since then, they’ve averaged just over three runs per game, losing 16 of 23, including seven straight.
The Twins, meanwhile, have lost 22 of their last 33, including 11 of their last 16. True, it’s difficult for the Twins to win with three rookies in their rotation. But the Tigers for much of their 27-11 run had only two starters taking regular turns, Tarik Skubal and Keider Montero. And let’s not forget, they were sellers at the trade deadline.
So, as we enter the final week, the AL wild-card standings look like this:
- BAL +4
- DET –
- KC –
- MIN -1
- SEA -2
If the Mariners had not blown a 5-4 lead in the seventh inning to the Rangers on Sunday, I’d be doing a mea culpa for their fans, too. And considering the way the Royals and Twins are staggering, a full-blown apology might be only days away.
The remaining schedules:
- DET: TB 3, CWS 3
- KC: @WAS 3, @ATL 3
- MIN: MIA 3, BAL 3
- SEA: @HOU 3, OAK 3
Stuck in the middle with you: Where do the Red Sox and Cubs go from here?
We’re five seasons into the 2020s now, and two big-market franchises — the Red Sox and Cubs — can’t blame curses anymore for their mediocrity. Boston will miss the playoffs for the fifth time in six seasons since their 2018 championship, and while they did a splendid job playing spoiler for the Twins on Sunday, that’s not what they play for in Boston.
While the Red Sox are technically still alive for a playoff spot, they’ve lost Rafael Devers and Kenley Jansen for the season with shoulder injuries, and Jen McCaffrey says it’s time to gather more intel for the future.
Wilyer Abreu? Let’s see him against lefties. Justin Slaten? Give him a chance to close. Richard Fitts? Another start, please. Vaughn Grissom? He’s back, so he’s got to play.
The doubleheader sweep brought the Red Sox to .500, while the Cubs are two games over the mark, at 80-76. Still, that’s well below expectations for a team that has yet to return to the World Series after its cathartic triumph eight years ago.
The Cubs seemed to signal a seriousness of purpose last season when they made Craig Counsell baseball’s highest-paid manager. With that comes power, and a significant voice in the direction of the franchise.
So when Counsell — whose old team, the Brewers, ran away with the NL Central — says something like this, it gets your attention: “I would jump to process.”
Here’s Patrick Mooney with a sharp analysis of what Counsell might have been revealing:
“(H)is vast knowledge of the inner workings of Milwaukee’s system has given him a different perspective. And the process of evaluating could lead to personnel changes.”
Undeniably, there were positives to this Cubs’ season. But credit Counsell for refusing to put a happy spin on a season of disappointment.
Or, as shortstop Dansby Swanson says in this piece by Sahadev Sharma: “What can we do to frickin’ dominate?”
Finding Nimmo in Playoffs: Longtime Met comes up big
Brandon Nimmo made his Mets debut in 2016, the year after the team’s last trip to the World Series. He’s played in three postseason games. He’s doing all he can for another chance.
“I’ve been here for a while,” Nimmo said in the clubhouse after a victory on Saturday night. “I want to see winning baseball. I want to see playoffs.”
On Sunday, Nimmo broke a tie with a laser of a sixth-inning homer off his former teammate, the Phillies’ Zack Wheeler. The 2-1 victory kept Philadelphia from clinching the NL East at Citi Field and sent the Mets to Atlanta with a two-game edge on the Braves for a wild-card spot.
The Mets, to put it simply, are feelin’ it. Francisco Lindor missed the entire homestand with a back problem, and the team went 6-1 without him. Rookie Luisangel Acuña, 22, has played nine games this month, and he’s hitting .379 with three home runs. Now he gets to play in front of his famous brother, Ronald Acuña Jr., the injured MVP.
At the moment, the Mets technically hold the second of three NL wild cards, because they have the tiebreaker over the Diamondbacks, who blew an 8-0 lead in Milwaukee on Sunday and now own the same 87-69 mark as New York.
That would set up the Mets for a best-of-three wild-card series in San Diego with the Padres, who beat the Mets in that round in Flushing in 2022.
All that could change if the Mets flop in Atlanta, where the teams meet for three games starting tomorrow. The Braves earned their victory in Miami yesterday with clutch, stingy work from their bullpen. After Aaron Bummer and Daysbel Hernández worked out of a bases-loaded, no-out jam in the seventh, Raisel Iglesias finished off a 5-4 victory with his first two-inning save of the season.
David O’Brien has the story on Atlanta’s pitching plans for the Mets’ series, the surging Matt Olson and the defensive wizardry of Michael Harris II. And here’s Will Sammon’s report from a raucous Citi Field after the Mets finished took three of four.
Handshakes and High Fives
Jasson Domínguez homered in the Yankees’ final game in Oakland. Here’s Brendan Kuty on what Dominguez hopes to learn from Juan Soto, plus other Yankee tibits.
Jayson Stark made the case for the Yankees’ Aaron Judge and Juan Soto being MLB’s greatest offensive duo since Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.
Yordan Alvarez — the slugging titan no pitcher wants to face in October — left Sunday’s game with a right knee contusion after an awkward slide into second. Here’s what we know, via Chandler Rome, who also has news on Yusei Kikuchi.
Most-clicked in Friday’s newsletter: Fabian Ardaya’s look at whether Shohei Ohtani’s 50/50 game was the single greatest baseball game ever.
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(Top photo: Denis Poroy/Getty Images)
