Steve Webb
LOS ANGELES, CA — Around this time of year, baseball fans’ math skills get tested. All this talk of magic numbers and potential playoff scenarios and tiebreakers can make a guy’s head spin. But for the Los Angeles Dodgers, it’s pretty simple: win two out of three from the Padres in the series that starts on Tuesday, and the NL West crown is yours. Lose two out of three or get swept, and things get a whole lot more complicated.
Let me explain. Right now, the Dodgers have a three game lead over their rivals to the south. There are six games remaining for each team. That makes the Dodgers’ “magic number” four. In other words, any combination of four Dodgers win and/or Padres losses will give the division to the Dodgers for the eleventh time in the last twelve years (dang 2021 Giants!). Anything short of that and the Padres are your NL West champs.
The easiest and most efficient way to do this is to win a couple of the head-to-head matchups at the Ravine this week. Since the Dodgers can’t win without the Padres also losing, every win in the next three games will knock TWO games off the magic number. And even the biggest dunderhead in town could tell you that two times two is four. So, there you have it, two wins = NL West champs.
But what if the Dodgers fall short of that in this series? Then things get interesting. And not in a good way. If the Dodgers win one of the three games, the two teams would head into the weekend with Dodgers clinging to a two game lead with a magic number of two. That means that the Dodgers could win the division outright by taking two out of three from the Rockies on the last weekend of the season. Or, if they don’t do that, they have to hope that the Diamondbacks win at least one or two games against the Padres in Phoenix. Basically, if the Padres want to win the West in this scenario, they would have to win two more games than the Dodgers in their last series of the year. So, if the Dodgers get swept, the Padres need to take two of three. If the Dodgers win one over the Rockies, the Padres need to sweep the D-Backs.
If the Padres should sweep the Dodgers this week (yikes!), things get very dicey indeed. Then, the two teams would go into the final weeekend tied for first place. But not really. Since the Padres own the tie-breaker over the Dodgers, they would only have to keep pace with the Dodgers’ win total over the weekend, and they would have the NL West crown. That is a much easier path, and that is the scenario the Dodgers would most like to avoid, especially because it would require using precious human capital all the way to the end of the year to avoid having to play the Wild Card round. That might leave the Dodgers in a tough spot entering October. One has to only recall the Max Muncy injury on the final day of the 2021 season to know that it might not be such a horrible thing to have a little breathing room at the end of the year.
Going into this key series, the website FanGraphs estimates the Dodgers’ chances of winning the NL West at 90.6% and the Padres’ chances at 9.3% (which doesn’t equal 100%, but whatever). Obviously, I’d rather be the Dodgers than the Padres at this point in the season.
Basically the task of the Dodgers is pretty straightforward: don’t get swept. If they win two of three, we get a celebration on the field at Dodger Stadium, which is always fun. If they sweep the Padres out of town, even better. But it’s like that old Miller Lite Commercial:
“All we need is one pin, Rodney.”
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