The Milwaukee Brewers started fast last night and built up a 6-0 lead (a huge lead in baseball) but the St. Louis Cardinals mounted a furious comeback, took the lead late, and won 7-6. This clinched the fifth and final NL playoff tournament spot for the Colorado Rockies, despite them losing to the Los Angeles Dodgers 5-3.
SO THE POST SEASON FIELD IS ALL SET, INCLUDING SEEDINGS. I will make up a little spreadsheet and take a screenshot later to show (hopefully) the tournament details and three rounds in each league. But to summarize, the 5 teams in each league that are IN are listed below, in order of seedings. The first three seeds in each league are Division Winners, and this is important because it gives them a bye in the first round, and they automatically move to the second round (the Division Series Round).
The first round consists of the the two "wild card" (non-division winners) playing each other, with the winner moving on to the Division Series Round and the loser eliminated. This first "round" is really one game (whereas all of the other rounds are a "best of" series) but if you win this one game and move on, you are considered to have won a Playoff Series. And as I've said before, there are 30 Major League Baseball teams, with long and rich traditions. At some point in their history, all 30 have made the Playoffs. But there is only ONE of the 30 that has NEVER, EVER won a single Playoff Series.... my beloved Washington Nationals. And in keeping true to form, yesterday their number one pitcher (Max Scherzer), who was certainly going to start Game 1 of their Division Series against the Chicago Cubs, injured his hamstring... sigh.
Anyway, here are the 10 Playoff Tournament Teams:
American League
1) Cleveland Indians (No. 1 seed in AL, home field advantage throughout AL playoffs)
2) Houston Astros
3) Boston Red Sox
Those are the three Division winners who receive a bye through the first round and move directly to the Divisional Series. The two AL wild card teams are:
4)New York Yankees (as the higher Wild Card Seed will have home field advantage in the Wild Card game)
5)Minnesota Twins
THe American League Wild Card game is scheduled for Tuesday, October 3 in New York.
National League
1)Los Angeles Dodgers (No 1 seed in all of MLB, home field advantage throughout all the playoffs)
2)Washington Nationals
3)Chicago Cubs
Those are the three Division winners who receive a bye through the first round and move directly to the Divisional Series. The two NL wild card teams are:
4) Arizona Diamondbacks (as the higher Wild Card Seed will have home field advantage in the Wild Card game)
5) Colorado Rockies
The National League Wild Card game is scheduled for Wednesday, October 4 in Arizona.
ADDED IN EDIT: MLB.com has a nice little post season page showing the three rounds in each league (the AL moves from the left side of the page to the right, while the NL moves from the right side of the page to the left) but it only shows team logos and some here may not recognize team logos. I'm still going to make my spreadsheet, but it will be very similar to this, and instead of team logos will show "Team" names, meaning the GoG member owner of each team in the brackets.
http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/standings/postseason-picture/
And here is the entire Post Season schedule (though there are still a lot of times TBD (to be determined) and a lot of starting pitchers TBD.
http://m.mlb.com/postseason-schedule