Now that the trade deadline and its accompanying madness have come and gone, it’s time for Major League Baseball’s stretch run to whittle its playoff races down to 10 final teams.
Time will be the final judge on that. But since time takes, well, time, let’s entertain ourselves by calling the shots.
Ahead is a look at 11 teams that are technically in contention, but we’ll sort each into one of two categories: contenders and pretenders. We’ll be looking at teams’ current standings, as well as overall performance, recent performance and what they’re working with heading into the final two months.
The list could be longer, but we’re excluding teams that are obvious contenders with big division leads and/or huge playoff odds at Baseball Prospectus, as well as teams (i.e. the New York Yankees) that have put up a white flag.
For the 11 teams that did make the cut, we’ll go in order from worst record to best record.