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Welcome to the one day in baseball when all the games start at the same time. Well, more or less: there is a 15-minute window, beginning at 12:05pm Arizona time, during which all fifteen Major League games will kick off. This has been happening since the 2015 season. According to Tony Petitti, MLB chief operating officer at that point, “If a game impacts another game, they're all occurring at the same time, so no team would be put into a lame-duck situation because their fate already had been decided by an earlier result. If we do have games coming down to the wire, we want to make sure we maximize that day." This year, though? Not so much.
Everything has been decided and the first round playoff schedule is set, beginning with the two wild-card games on Tuesday (American League) and Wednesday (I forget who’s playing in that one...). This promises to be quite the boring day across baseball. In Kansas City, the D-backs will try to avoid going into the playoffs having been swept by the Royals, who will be attempting to finish the season at .500. Given previous history, I kinda hope Arizona does lose, because I’ve repeatedly seen how some fans meltdown when we lose three in a row, going all the way back to the first time it happened, on April 12-15. Doing so again as we enter the post-season would only be fitting.
Because, despite all the proclamations of doom every time - and we’ve lost three or more in a row TEN TIMES already this year - it doesn’t matter in the slightest. What will determine our fate isn’t what takes place today in Kansas City, it is 100% down to how the team plays on Wednesday, back at home in Chase Field. Even a blowout loss here means absolutely nothing. We saw this after arguably the worst loss of the year in Minnesota, where we were nine down by the end of the first inning, and ended up with Daniel Descalso pitching. We then won 15 of the next 16 games. If that’s what it takes for such a streak, maybe we want to see Descalso on the mound again today!