Sports News With MLB

We got free baseball on Monday. Yay us!

Due to the regular-season ties in the National League’s Central and West Divisions, playoff games were required to determine which team won the division and which team continued in the postseason as a wild card.

Wow. Talk about everybody getting a trophy. Losers didn’t really lose, they just moved on to a tougher round of the playoffs.

All things considered, you couldn’t come up much luckier than the Chicago Cubs, and who thought anyone would ever say that? They were the hosts to the Milwaukee Brewers on Monday in the Central Division title game and lost, 3-1. But they stay at home on Tuesday to play the Colorado Rockies, who zip in from Los Angeles where they lost 5-1 to the Dodgers in the NL West fight.

The Brewers were five games back of the Cubs on Sept. 1 but got hot late and made the most of it. They tied a franchise high with 96 victories and now don’t have to play until Thursday.

Despite getting stretched to a 163rd game, the Dodgers won their sixth straight NL West title. They will host the Atlanta Braves, the NL East winner, beginning Thursday.

With its postseason off to an early and fun start, baseball can look ahead to exciting playoff matches. The Braves are the team of tomorrow, the Boston Red Sox won at a phenomenal clip and the New York Yankees set a record for home runs in a season. And there are the Houston Astros, baseball’s defending World Series champs.

With any luck, the October Classic won’t stretch into November. If it does? Ah, so what.

 
 
Post By: Larry Weisman, a longtime sportswriter for USA TODAY, blogs for Twistity.com. Follow him on Twitter @MrLarryWeisman