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Wilson Contreras and Pete Crow-Armstrong next to Nor'easter
Major League Baseball has spent six months letting 30 teams determine its playoff bracket, and there is now a legitimate chance a giant storm off the Atlantic gets a vote too. A potential nor’easter threatening Boston during the final weekend could disrupt the Cubs-Red Sox series badly enough that MLB may still be trying to determine postseason seeding after the regular season is technically supposed to be over.
Chicago visits Fenway Park for games Friday, Saturday and Sunday while forecasts call for significant rain and high winds across New England. Front Office Sports reports the MLB has no finalized contingency plan yet, with possibilities ranging from moving game times to squeezing in a doubleheader or, if the results still matter, making everyone come back Monday.
The Cubs Cannot Exactly Just Call It A Season
Boston is inconveniently one of the least worried parties in this equation.
The Red Sox have already clinched a playoff spot and are overwhelmingly likely to finish as the American League’s No. 5 seed, setting up a Wild Card Series against the Yankees.
Chicago has considerably more unfinished business.
The Cubs entered the final week battling for the National League’s top Wild Card spot, which comes with the extremely useful prize of hosting every game in the best-of-three opening round. San Diego and Philadelphia remain part of that seeding race, meaning Chicago cannot simply look outside Saturday morning, see horizontal rain, and agree to reconvene next March.
The MLB schedule has Friday’s opener set for 7:10 p.m., followed by Saturday night and Sunday afternoon games.
Mother Nature did not consult MLB Advanced Media before making her weekend plans.
The league could move start times if forecasts reveal playable windows. A doubleheader is another possibility.
Then comes the option nobody particularly wants: Monday baseball.
MLB Has Already Seen This Movie
Unfortunately, there is a very recent instruction manual for this exact mess.
Hurricane Helene forced the Mets and Braves to postpone two crucial games at the end of the 2024 regular season. MLB eventually scheduled a Monday doubleheader, and both teams entered it still needing results to determine the final National League playoff spots.
They played 18 innings, the postseason bracket finally became official, and then the playoffs started Tuesday.
Atlanta traveled directly from the doubleheader into a Wild Card Series in San Diego and was swept, creating plenty of criticism about how the weather situation had been handled.
Two years later, MLB might be staring at the sequel.
There are ways the problem can disappear. Chicago’s exact seed could become locked before all three Boston games need to be completed, making an unplayed finale irrelevant to the standings. The storm could also shift enough to provide usable windows.
That is the wonderfully annoying thing about weather forecasts several days out.
Nobody knows yet.
What MLB does know is that the regular season is supposed to finish Sunday, Sept. 27. The Wild Card round begins Tuesday, and somewhere between those two dates, the league may have to fit an extremely meaningful baseball game into whatever opening the nor’easter leaves behind.