The more I look at the clusterf*** of a playoff situation, the more I wonder if the insanest possible outcome - winning the division - is actually the cleanest to the playoffs. On the one hand, obviously it is (in the sense of, well, if you win your division you both don't have to worry about the 6 non-division teams you are fighting, and you make the actual playoffs without the drama of the play-in WC), but moreso what has me thinking this is that we have so many division games left as it is, meaning that the amount of general wins we need to be competitive overlaps to a large extent with the amount of wins that would end up coming vs the divisional opponents.
8 games back is pretty much an impossibility, and we're just not going to run the table on the Cubs, Brewers, and Cards in the remaining matchups, as astounding as that would be. But if we can tighten the gap rapidly, then we'd at least have a fighting chance in the final five weeks or so, obviously assuming that we were pretty pristine in the Cubs/Brewers matchups in September. The Cubs are trailing by a little bit early in their game right now, and tomorrow they have to face Scherzer, with the Nationals obviously in the same boat as us. They play Milwaukee while we are in Minnesota. This means that if we can get pretty hot, we might actually be able to close that gap to a more manageable 2-3 games if we get really lucky.
The biggest flaw in what I'm sort of raising is that it basically means we would need to sweep the Cubs at home next week, because even if we go 3-1, which in the abstract is a great result, we only pickup two games. But if we can shave two games in the next two days, do well in Minnesota, and then run the table against them at home, we'll be in the mix for the division, with things maybe even a bit more in our hands compared to whatever is going to happen between Philly, Atlanta, Washington, LA, Arizona, Colorado, and San Francisco.
In the immediate term, we basically just need to keep winning series and try to shave off as much as we can, without really falling off. I'm sure there's a more precise way to figure this out, but we probably can't afford to do much more than lose a couple series from now on. It's going to be a wild ride, and it's probably better to hold off counting every single game until it's September, but realistically it's an extremely difficult path to the playoffs for basically any of these teams. Maybe if you're an extreme optimist, you think playing from behind is a motivating factor and gives you a little bit of an edge. If that's the case, then we need to rattle off the wins now, going 7-1 in the next week or so.
