Halfway into the 2021 baseball season, the Second Division is producing a race such as we have never seen. All eight clubs are separated by less than two games.
A look at the standings through the baseball pyramid at the All-Star break reveals a thick race at the top and in the middle of the First Division, an incredibly tight Second Division from top to bottom, little suspense in the Third Division and another quandary such as only the baseball Fourth Division can produce.
Starting at the bottom, we see the Chicago White Sox on a clear path to winning the Fourth Division and entering next year's Third Division and Super League. They are clearly the best team in the American League Central, and it happens that the Fourth Division contains two divisional underlings, the Kansas City Royals and Detroit Tigers, against whom to ring up many victories.
A different circumstance confronts the San Diego Padres, who have emerged this season as a national factor across the big leagues, but they are trapped in this Fourth Division with no one to play.
In no other ordinal division of any other sport that we track on these pages do these sorts of problems arise, because the other sports play some kind of round robin schedule. But baseball's schedule, being imbalanced as it is, sometimes puts us in a tough spot with the Fourth Division. The problem is intensified because the division has only six clubs, rather than eight.
It often happens, like this year, that some team just stomps through the division, and it's hard sometimes to qualify a second club for promotion. Various rules have been tried here, and remain in force. But the Padres are "trapped," as it sometimes happens, because they're a division that lays out so they only get seven games, all against the Miami Marlins.
We do have a precedent in the Fourth Division that amounts to making the Padres eligible for promotion if they win five of those seven games. If they don't, we might have a problem, because it's likely every other team in the Fourth Division will have a losing record, except the White Sox. If the Padres win four, this becomes quite thorny.
We might end up biting the bullet and saying that just in this one special case, the Fourth Division in baseball, the second promotion will be a judgment call. Hate to do that. Hope we don't have to. Because if you're looking at the teams in the Fourth Division, the White Sox and the Padres are the teams that have to go up. The White Sox will make it. And one supposes the Padres would make it if they played enough games. They might end up making it, though, simply because no one else reaches a winning record.
In that case, we would have to suspend certain minimum requirements for promotion, but that sometimes becomes necessary to promote two Fourth Division teams. And why is it necessary to promote two Fourth Division teams? So that two Third Division teams can be demoted. There's usually no problem producing two teams that deserve it.
In the Third Division, we have no race to speak of. The San Francisco Giants and Seattle Mariners have raced way out in front of the pack, and it's likely they will be the two clubs promoted to next year's Second Division and Super League. At the bottom of this pile, we find the Pittsburgh Pirates and Texas Rangers, both apparently completing the long decent to the bottom tier.
The Rangers played among kings in the early days of this pyramid, which began tracking in 2010, but they now are facing their second straight demotion and the queasy reality of the Fourth Division for the first time. The Pirates were an original Fourth Division club in 2010, but they won it in 2012 and then won the Third Division in 2014. They spent five years in the Second Division before their demotion off 2019 and now they, too, face their second straight demotion.
Our Second Division is the stuff that dreams are made of, all eight teams riding within 1½ games of each other with many games remaining for each of these teams. The schedule lightweight here is Oakland, which has nine of its 22 Second Division games remaining. Everyone else has 15-20 games remaining. The A's come out of the All-Star break with a Second Division home series against the Cleveland Indians.
This is one division where every game is going to count. The top two finishers go to next year's First Division, and the top three finishers will be in the Super League. The bottom two finishers are going down.
This is a tough, even assembly of teams, and one can see it from the fact that the Red Sox are 11-10 here. In every other division we run, and in the real standings, too, the Red Sox are a behemoth. But in this Second Division, they are 11-10.
One benefit of introducing the Super League is that it makes the whole First Division more interesting. There is a race for championship in the top tier, but, obviously not a race for promotion, so putting the top half of the First Division into the Super League raises the stakes in the middle of the league.
When all the smoke clears, the only teams in the First Division now left standing still are the fifth-place and sixth-place teams, who occupy a middle station between Super League glory and Second Division banishment. They merely get to remain in the First Division.
We're pretty sure by now that the Arizona Diamondbacks will be banished, as they reached the All-Star break 3-21 in the top level. We ended up skipping 2020 in the pyramids because the teams didn't get around enough, but it remains that games were played, timed passed and the Diamondbacks declined so much from 2019 to 2021 that they are misplaced and not even competitive in this year's First Division.
If we could have played the pyramids in 2020, the Diamondbacks would have been demoted then, probably, and they now would be fighting to stave off relegation to the Third Division. Instead, they're getting their brains beat in against the First Division.
At the top of the First Division, the Dodgers are one-half game ahead of the Milwaukee Brewers, no doubt a benefit of having the Diamondbacks in this company. A mere two games separates the third-place St. Louis Cardinals from the sixth-place New York Yankees. Add another half-game and we can throw in the Minnesota Twins, if they actually can win enough games against this group to reach the top half.
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