Heading into Sunday, the Washington Nationals are 4 games behind for the second Wild Card. It would be a shock if they missed the playoffs altogether based on the lofty preseason predictions that surrounded the team, but it’s certainly not out of the question.<\/p>\n
Realistically there are seven teams competing for five playoff spots in the National League if we cut things off at the Nationals, which seems fair with the Arizona Diamondbacks being eight games out of the Wild Card and not obviously possessing a roster that could go on an incredible run.<\/p>\n
The St Louis Cardinals, LA Dodgers, San Francisco Giants and Washington Nationals were all expected to be in the mix and, given their form over the past couple of seasons, the same could be said for the Pittsburgh Pirates.<\/p>\n
It’s the New York Mets and Chicago Cubs who are the interesting additions. Both are teams who, more often than not, should be in the playoff hunt considering the resources they have available.<\/p>\n
We all know that the Mets have been run as a lower-middle revenue team in recent seasons due to issues with the owners; however the offense is starting to show signs of life to go alongside their enviable crop of young pitchers. Mets fans have been waiting a while for a season like this and you get the sense that they are a team that could ride on a wave the rest of the way.<\/p>\n
As for the Cubs, their recent struggles in the standings have been part of a plan to rebuild and it looks like that plan is coming together brilliantly. 2015 seemed like being a year too early for this group and that may still prove to be the case, yet if they can stick in there you never know what type of run they could put together down the stretch.<\/p>\n
It’s been great watching lower-revenue teams like the Pirates and Kansas City Royals turn their fortunes around recently; however there’s no doubt that for baseball as a whole it’s a hugely positive development to see two big market teams in the Cubs and Mets actually starting to contend again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Cubs and Mets are contending again<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[553],"class_list":["post-18907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mlb-2","tag-mlb-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18907"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18909,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18907\/revisions\/18909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baseballgb.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}