Throughout the season the CBS Sports MLB experts will bring you a weekly Batting Around roundtable breaking down pretty much anything. The latest news, a historical question, thoughts about the future of baseball, all sorts of stuff. Last week we picked between baseball’s many Jacksons. This week we’re going to tackle the AL wild-card race.
Which team will get the final AL wild-card spot?
R.J. Anderson: I suspect the Tigers are going to be the popular pick here, and for good reason — you have to tip your cap to them for how well they’ve played since July, and it would be fun to see them complete the comeback and make it into October. That said, I’ll go with the Twins for the sake of variety. The two teams are pretty close in season-long run differential, yet I think that might undersell the Twins’ capabilities now that they’ve got arguably their three best hitters in the lineup again — that being Royce Lewis, Byron Buxton, and Carlos Correa. Minnesota has had its fair share of issues lately, however, so it’s possible that the water doesn’t still before it’s too late for the Twins.
Dayn Perry: This late in the regular season, I’m inclined to be boring and pick whoever’s in front, even if it’s by a slim margin. All of that describes the Twins. They’re also generally healthy right now, especially in the lineup, and neither the Tigers nor Mariners have any remaining head-to-head games against Minnesota. I’ll say the Twins hang on.
Matt Snyder: I’ll go with the Tigers. They have three games against the White Sox to finish the season and I think we can assume those are wins. If that’s the case, I have confidence the Tigers outplay the Twins the rest of the way, given how both teams have been going the last month-plus.
Mike Axisa: As poorly as they’ve played the last few weeks, I’m sticking with the Twins. They own the tiebreaker over the Tigers, so Detroit has to finish ahead of them, not simply catch them. That ups the difficulty a little bit. Mostly though, I think the Twins are the better and more talented team even if that hasn’t been reflected on the field lately. Feels like this run is a little too late for Detroit. It’s still fun though, and I’m glad they’re giving us a race. Not too long it appeared the six AL postseason teams were set. Now we have a legit competition late in the season.
