The Cincinnati Reds have Thursday off, but on Friday night the New York Mets come to town and if the Reds want to have much of any sort of hope for making the playoffs they likely need to pull off a sweep. The loss on Wednesday by Cincinnati, combined with a win by the San Francisco Giants dropped the Reds to the 5th spot in the wild card race where the top three teams get into the postseason. Cincinnati is currently 5.0 games behind the Mets and now one full game behind the Giants.
There are only 22 games remaining for Cincinnati. If the Mets and Giants both go .500 the rest of the season, then that means the Reds would need to go 16-6 just to tie with New York in the standings. The tie breaker if two teams are tied would first go to head-to-head record. Cincinnati took two of three in New York to open the second half, so if they were to win this upcoming series they would own the tiebreaker against them.
But winning the series and not sweeping the series would put the Reds are 72-71. With it seemingly likely that they’ll need at least 86 wins to have a chance, they would mean they would be looking at going 14-5 the rest of the way to reach that mark.
You often hear that every game counts the same, but that really isn’t true. Beating the Rockies is not the same as beating a team you are actually competing against for a playoff spot because that Rockies loss doesn’t matter in the standings, while beating the Mets does (using this season as an example).
The odds are still going to be long for Cincinnati even if they can sweep New York this weekend. But without a sweep, things look about as dire as can be. Time is running out and you simply can’t just hope you get hot later on to make up for it. The season isn’t long enough for that hope to be realistic at this point. You have to get hot right now and keep it going through the rest of the season. And even then you need both the Mets and the Giants to play worse than they have all season to finish ahead of both of them even if you do get hot. They can play a part in that when it comes to the Mets since they get three chances to face them, but there’s no margin for error this weekend. Or the rest of the season.
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