Ranking all 30 MLB teams by their relevance in the month of September
By Jake Mintz
FOX Sports MLB Writer
September is here: the home stretch, the final month. Four more weeks of regular-season baseball games before the chaos of October takes over our lives.
September baseball is a Darth Maul lightsaber, a double-edged sword, if you will. On one hand, there’s the tension and dramatic weight of the postseason chase, the who’s in and who’s out. Will any of the front-runners capitulate? Is an unexpected team going to make a run? As the remaining games tick away, we watch the scoreboard and hope for four-way ties and total entropy.
Unfortunately, all of that usually applies to only a handful of teams. For more than half the league, the eternal springtime hope of Opening Day has long since rusted away, and the month’s final season can feel like watching the credits roll after an underwhelming movie. No Minneapolis fan is seriously yearning for one more month of the 2021 Twins.
Both sides of this coin make September MLB games a fascinating operation. Some teams are playing for everything; others are playing out the string. So with the summer heat starting to dissipate and Labor Day around the corner, let’s take a look at the most (and least) relevant MLB teams in the upcoming final month of the season, from 30 to 1.
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Mr. Irrelevant
30. Chicago Cubs
The lovable losers are back, baby. I’ll admit there’s a certain amount of relevance built in when you play games at Wrigley Field, but besides that, I think the Cubbies are the league’s least important team this September. Like every other bad team, they’ll get some chances to play spoiler, but beyond that, they’ll primarily operate as a vehicle for a Romine family reunion.
Fun players, no stakes
29. Minnesota Twins
28. Miami Marlins
The only reason the Twins are at 29 and not 30 is Byron Buxton. He’s back off the injured list and is must-see MLB.TV whenever he’s on the diamond. The Marlins have Jazz Chisholm and Trevor Rogers fighting for the NL Rookie of the Year, as well as some other fun youngins, but the stakes are very low. Cleveland is a much better team than Minnesota or Miami, but that squad is way out of the postseason race, and the only real storyline to watch is whether they can hold off the surging Tigers for the No. 2 spot in the AL Central.
The race for the No. 1 pick
25. Texas Rangers
Tanking is bad, but picking first is good. Therein lies the conundrum. Despite losing 19 consecutive baseball games, the Orioles have only a 1.5-game lead on Arizona for the first selection in next year’s draft. Pittsburgh trails Texas by one game for the third pick. Next year’s draft is looking pretty stacked, with some potential generational talents, so how these four dreadful teams perform down the stretch could make quite a big impact down the road.
Watch a world-beater
Even though all of these squads are out of the postseason race and the No. 1 pick chase, they’ve each got a franchise icon (Juan Soto, Salvy Pérez and Shohei Ohtani) operating at maximum incredibleness. Soto is seeking to be just the ninth player this century to post a walk rate over 20% in a full season. Pérez cannot stop hitting homers, and if he stays this hot, he could make a late, dark-horse run for a top-three AL MVP spot.
And I don't know if you’ve been living in a hole or something, but Ohtani is in the midst of the most impressive season in baseball history. We have only one more month to pay witness, so make the best of it because he sure as hell won’t be playing in October.
Can they catch the Mets?
19. Colorado Rockies
18. Detroit Tigers
Both of these teams were supposed to suck eggs, and instead, they’ve been simply below average. The Mets, on the other hand, were supposed to kick ass, and they’re alongside Colorado and Detroit in the standings. I doubt anyone in the Rockies or Tigers clubhouse is giving pregame pump-up speeches about finishing above New York in the standings, but that's the type of notable happening that we can reference all offseason when reviewing the Mets' disastrous season. Also, if the Tigers can catch Cleveland for second place in the division, that’d be a huge boost for a rebuilding club looking to compete sooner rather than later.
2Good 2B Compelling
15. Houston Astros
14. Tampa Bay Rays
Barring an unforeseen enormous collapse, these four clubs should waltz their way to division titles at some point in September. At this point, it’s essentially Spring Training 2.0: Don’t completely fall apart, make sure no one important gets hurt, and get the pitchers ready for October. All four are legitimate World Series contenders (duh), but chances are they won’t play too much high-stakes baseball in September.
The Mets
13. New York Mets
The Queens circus troupe is six back in the division and 5.5 back in the wild-card hunt, so unless they get hotter than the takes around ThumbsDownGate, Francisco Lindor, Javier Báez, Michael Conforto & Co. will be spending October on the couch. But these are the New York Mets of Major League Baseball, a lightning rod of what-the-hell-isms, a conveniently placed, oversized tank of gasoline in an action movie, just waiting to blow. Something else will happen. These are just the facts of life.
On the fringes
12. Seattle Mariners
All three of these teams are on the outside looking in at the playoffs for different reasons, but outside they undoubtedly are. Seattle has been outplaying its run differential all season — focusing instead on "fun differential" — but just dropped three of four at home to K.C., which is decidedly not fun if you’re actually trying to make the playoffs.
The Jays would be right in the mix if they played in the AL Central and didn’t have to face the Yanks, Red Sox and Rays so often, but I’d also be in the big leagues if I threw 100, and alas, both of those scenarios are alternate realities.
The Cards are like your quarterly taxes: You forget about them all summer, and then September comes around, and you really don’t feel like thinking about them. But STL is here and playing well.
The risk with all three of these clubs is that if they have one bad week, it’s curtains for the whole month. Sure, they’re all technically capable of making a run and playing significant games the last week of the season, but the relatively small number in the games back column right now is deceptive.
NL East
Four of the six division races are snoozers, the NL West is high theater, and the NL East is somewhere in between. The Mets had a firm grip on things until they disintegrated into a sea of sorrow after the All-Star break. Philly was in first for about two hours. Then the Braves got hot, and it has been that way ever since. The Phillies' getting swept by the lowly D-backs didn't help things.
Neither of these teams is actually that good, and with Rhys Hoskins out for the year and the pitching still an enormous question behind Zack Wheeler, there’s a good chance Philly has a cold stretch that puts this team back seven games, allowing Atlanta to run away with the division.
But so far, the Phils are sticking around and chillin’ just 2.5 behind Atlanta. I’m holding out hope that we’ll be treated to a chaotic clustertruck of a final month, with someone taking the division with 85 wins after a one-game playoff.
NL West
The division race between these two rivals will be outstanding, but because they’d both need an epic catastrophe to miss the playoffs, in these rankings, they’re just behind all the wild-card teams fighting for an October ticket. Still, the division means a great deal, given that the winner gets to avoid the randomness of a one-game coin flip and go straight to the NLDS.
Unfortunately, the Giants and the Dodgers have only three games remaining against each other, and they play this weekend. In another, more perfect world, they’d be ending the season by facing off with the NL's top seed up for grabs. Alas, we’ll have to settle for a "Who can smack the D-backs around more?" competition.
Race for the AL wild card
Unless the Yankees crumble or the Jays or Mariners catch fire, one of these two esteemed baseball outfits will have the pleasure of opposing Gerrit Cole at Yankee Stadium in a one-game playoff. Sounds fun! I’d pass, but you do you.
Neither of these teams inspires a whole lot of confidence right now. The Red Sox have a truly potent lineup at full strength and just got a fully operational Chris Sale back off the IL, but they’ve also shipped 11.5 games away to the Rays since the All-Star break. Not to mention, they’re in the middle of a sizable COVID outbreak that has forced some of their key contributors, including Xander Bogaerts, off the diamond. Boston also happens to be one of the few teams yet to reach MLB’s 85% vaccination threshold. Hmmm.
Meanwhile, the A’s are just ... the A’s. You know, a bunch of pitchers you’ve never heard of, two guys named Matt, a very good bullpen of guys who have been there forever. The vibes in Oakland are always great, and Bob Melvin always seems to get the best out of that squad. Starling Marte being along for the ride this time certainly makes them better and more fun. And they’ll need all the good energy they can muster to catch Boston and earn the right to get their doors blown off by Cole in front of 45,000 New Yorkers on Oct. 5.
Race for the NL wild card
While the second AL wild-card spot feels more like "Which one of the teams that we always see in October can mess this up less?," the NL race has some refreshing energy to it. The Reds haven’t been in a real postseason since 2013, and the Padres haven’t played in a non-COVID Cup playoff since the Coolidge administration (actually, it's since 2006).
But recent expectations and the offseason Padres hype train conducted by people such as I cast a wide shadow over this race. For the Reds fan base and players, missing the postseason would be disappointing no doubt, but their failure wouldn’t reverberate on a national level. If the Padres miss the postseason, that’s exactly what would happen.
It is San Diego that had nine fingers on a playoff spot halfway through the season, only to sneeze it away in a month’s time. The brash, take-no-prisoners bravado we all love to watch, the high-energy, Cirque du Soleil of baseball that overpacked the Padres bandwagon last season needs to be built on a bedrock of W’s. You can be as loud as you want on vacation in October.
The idea of San Diego not even making it to the wild-card game after all this — *gestures to the hype I, myself, played a small hand in* — is just flat-out uncomfortable. Please, baseball gods, save us from the "Is Fernando Tatis Jr. the face of baseball if he didn’t make the postseason?" hot takes.
The Yankees
Despite rattling off 500 consecutive wins in the final two weeks of August, the Yanks are still eight games back of Tampa Bay, only two up on Boston for wild-card hosting duties and only three up on Oakland for a postseason spot. The season has definitely turned a corner since April, when fans were throwing things on the field. This is undoubtedly a Good Baseball Team again.
But the Yankees' gains rest on precipitous ground, as a cold week or a five-game skid could leave them outside October altogether. When it’s all said and done, Yankee Stadium will probably host the wild-card game, but it’s certainly not a done deal. New York is in the driver’s seat, but Boston and Oakland are in the car. Each game this team plays in September will be overanalyzed, heavily scrutinized and replayed on morning talk radio many times over.
Now that the Yankees have proven that they were a juggernaut all along, the real work begins: September baseball.
Jake Mintz is the louder half of @CespedesBBQ and a baseball analyst for FOX Sports. He’s an Orioles fan living in New York City, and thus, he leads a lonely existence most Octobers. If he’s not watching baseball, he’s almost certainly riding his bike. You can follow him on Twitter @Jake_Mintz.
