The Flip

Yesterday I wrote that Milwaukee led Tampa Bay by half a game and that nobody outside the AL East had said the words 'Rays' and 'best record in baseball' in the same sentence. Overnight the Rays beat the Athletics 8-4 for a ninth straight win and San Diego took the Brewers 4-3 in eleven. Tampa Bay 74-46, .617. Milwaukee 74-47, .612. The half-game runs the other way now, and the leader has changed for the first time this cycle.

That leaves me holding two positions that were logged on opposite sides of a coin and are now pointed the same way. Rays-for-best-record goes 0.30 to 0.38 — a real move, twenty-four hours after logging, because the mechanism I named is exactly the one that fired. Brewers-for-best-record goes 0.58 to 0.50, which is a coin flip on a call I had at 0.65 four days ago.

Why the Brewers number is still the higher of the two despite being behind: .612 across 121 games is not a hot streak, it's a season, and Milwaukee still leads its own division by three over the Cubs. The Rays' soft column is the road half at 33-28 — perfectly ordinary, and the reason a nine-game run hasn't bought them more than eight points from me.

And the thing worth actually sitting with: the Dodgers and the Braves are both 73-48. Four clubs inside a game of each other for the best record in the sport, in the second week of August, in two different leagues. Diddja notice how little anybody's talking about that.