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          MLB playoffs 2021: Game 162 didn't bring us chaos, but it brought us great baseball

          CHAOS VANISHED ALMOST in an instant Sunday afternoon, as if Thanos snapped his fingers and restored order to the baseball world. For much of the past week, as the American League contenders bunched together closer and closer at the top of the wild-card standings, we had been dreaming of a madcap, pandemonium-filled day. And for a few hours, we got it. Until suddenly, almost before we had time to mourn its loss, the game's superpowers were back where they seemingly always are, the upstarts were readying themselves to nurse a winter's worth of wounds and our dreams of days filled with win-or-go-home October games yielded to a far less inspiring reality.

          The brass tacks fallout looks like this: The New York Yankees will visit the Boston Red Sox on Tuesday to determine the American League wild-card winner, who has the pleasure of facing the 100-win Tampa Bay Rays in the division series starting Thursday. The Toronto Blue Jays, winners Sunday, and the Seattle Mariners, not winners, are done. The Los Angeles Dodgers won, but that and their previous 105 wins didn't matter because the San Francisco Giants won, too, and finished the year with 107 to clinch the National League West and relegate the Dodgers to a one-and-done wild-card game against St. Louis on Wednesday. The Houston Astros and the Chicago White Sox kick off their division series Thursday, and Milwaukee and Atlanta commence theirs Friday.

          It was, in the end, an outcome so chalk that the playoff bracket should be written on a blackboard. And yet as easy as it is to lament the aftermath of a day of Game 162s that didn't birth a single Game 163, it would be downright spoiled to forget the three-plus hours before the topsy-turvy straightened itself out. Oct. 3, 2021, was still a splendid day of baseball drama in its own right, ripe with tension and spectacle, heroes and goats, elation and regret. It was the final chapter in some stories and the first in others.

          The first pitch popped a catcher's mitt at 3:05 p.m. ET. Within 10 minutes, the greatest two-way player baseball has ever seen capped an MVP season with a leadoff home run, and one of the sport's most prolific postseason performers did the same. Only one of those home runs helped us get to the chaos theory we'd all been rooting for, but it was as if Shohei Ohtani and George Springer wanted the world to know that no matter how this day might shake out, the game's finest were prepared to do extraordinary things.

          Toronto, which signed Springer to a $150 million deal over the winter, suffered the greatest indignity Sunday. It did what it had to -- what it hadn't just one too many times over the previous 161 games. The Blue Jays, who spent half their home games on the road due to COVID-19 restrictions, who boast the highest run differential for a non-playoff team at +183 since the 2002 Red Sox, who terrified the Yankees enough that in the planning for a potential four-team wild-card tie that New York actually chose to play Boston instead of Toronto, spent the early part of Sunday blowing out the Baltimore Orioles. Two innings after Springer homered, he hit a grand slam. Sandwiched between the two was a home run from Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who would be MVP were Ohtani a normal human and not some baseball Transformer. The Blue Jays were winning by five runs in the second and by double digits by the fourth. They just needed help that never arrived.

          They had entered Sunday at 90-71, one game back of New York and Boston, tied with the Mariners, who were, in many ways, the Blue Jays' opposite. They didn't have stars. They did have a run differential (-51) worse than 17 teams'. They didn't, until this weekend, have fans that showed up at the stadium. It was heartening to see T-Mobile Park packed and loud and teeming with energy, and just as disheartening to watch Ohtani's home run followed by two more Los Angeles Angels runs and then a couple more and eventually too many for the Mariners to snap a postseason drought that now is two decades old.

          Toronto and Seattle were the primary agents of chaos, though they really didn't have much agency at all. Their success depended upon the Yankees or Red Sox (or both) falling apart the way they had far too often this season. New York and Boston are made of similar stock, and not just because they are moneyed blue bloods. Each has been maddeningly inconsistent, looking like a World Series contender one week and a team spending October watching TV the next. Their strands of championship DNA intertwine with those prone to frittering away what they've done on the season's final day.

          New York already had lost the first two games of its series against Tampa Bay, and each scoreless inning Sunday served as a reminder of lost opportunity. They kept coming. Five scoreless innings put up by Tampa Bay's Michael Wacha and one apiece by J.T. Chargois, Collin McHugh and David Robertson. Going into the bottom of the ninth, the Yankees' line on the scoreboard looked like binary code: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 -- eight innings, no runs, one hit, no errors.

          It was right around this time that the Red Sox were finishing rescuing themselves. For five innings, they'd looked feckless against a 23-year-old right-hander named Joan Adon, who was making his major league debut after throwing all of 18 innings above Class A. He flummoxed the Red Sox, and they trailed 5-1. They clawed home a run in the sixth and chased Adon, then went full vulture on the desiccated remains of the Nationals' bullpen, with an RBI single from Rafael Devers and two-run double from Alex Verdugo knotting the score at 5.

          Chaos -- a four-way tie for the wild card that would've resulted in two play-in games, or a three-way tie for both wild-card spots, or, best of all, three-way tie for one spot that would've added two winner-take-all games to the slate -- had felt palpable entering Sunday. Even halfway through the day, with the Blue Jays up big and the Red Sox down early, it seemed likely we'd get at least one Game 163. But by 6 p.m., as Boston tied it up in the seventh and the Yankees advanced runners to second and third base in the bottom of the ninth, it was like snow in a warm hand -- still feeling cool, yes, but fully aware how the story ends.

          In New York, it ended with a line drive from Aaron Judge that caromed off pitcher Andrew Kittredge's glove and skipped far enough away for Tyler Wade to beat the throw home. Twenty-four minutes later, Devers hit his second home run of the game, and 17 minutes later, the Red Sox sealed a 7-5 win.

          By then, the Blue Jays had won 12-4 -- for naught -- and after Juan Soto stared at a Nick Pivetta curveball to finalize Boston's victory, the Mariners pulled Kyle Seager, their longtime third baseman who's likely to hit free agency this winter. The fans who had stuffed T-Mobile cheered and cheered and kept cheering, Seager an avatar for the rest of this Mariners team that would lose to the Angels in a 7-3 game that wound up, at least for playoff positioning, being meaningless.

          Because it is the Yankees and the Red Sox, again. Only this isn't a programming decision. It is not East Coast bias. This is two teams that spent 162 games grinding in the only post-realignment division ever to boast four 90-plus-win teams. It is two teams that earned their positions. It is two fan bases that loathe each other, two starters in Boston's Nathan Eovaldi and New York's Gerrit Cole that rank 1-2 in the Fielding Independent Pitching metric in the AL, two lineups capable of littering the scoreboard not with zeroes but crooked numbers.

          By then, we had also given up on our dream of chaos in the NL West, which rightly came down to the season's final day. San Francisco needed to lose and Los Angeles win for a Game 163, and seeing as the Giants had won almost twice as many games as they'd lost this year, the former was far more unlikely than the latter.

          The Giants were the Giants, which is to say they hit in the clutch, fielded with aplomb and pitched with intent. They were up 7-1 by the fourth inning. Their biggest star, Buster Posey, drove in three runs. Their best pitcher in the second half, Logan Webb, shoved for seven innings and whacked a homer for good measure. The San Diego Padres, the most disappointing team in baseball, played to type every bit the same, and the Giants finally got to celebrate a 107-win season on its final day because the Dodgers never stopped nipping at their heels.

          That they never managed to catch San Francisco either was an upset. Los Angeles had won eight straight NL West titles, and this was arguably its most talented team yet. Even without the suspended Trevor Bauer. Even without the injured Clayton Kershaw and Dustin May. Whether that holds without Max Muncy, too, will soon be tested, as a nasty collision while he tried to catch a throw at first base left his October status in doubt. Same for the division series, though the Dodgers need first to vanquish St. Louis, recent winners of 17 straight and riders of 40-year-old right-hander Adam Wainwright, who will oppose 37-year-old Max Scherzer in the NL Wild Card Game, presented by Geritol.

          Sadly, Sunday did not bring us the standings upheaval of 2011, when the Rays finished erasing Boston's 9½-game lead by coming back from a 7-0 deficit against New York in Game 162 and when St. Louis clawed from 8½ back of Atlanta to win on the final day and watch the Braves suffer a brutal 13-inning loss. Chaos wouldn't be chaotic if it were easy.

          No, Sunday was a proper culmination of a story-filled season -- one where Ohtani stretched the notion of what a modern baseball player can be, Guerrero the limits of what a 22-year-old hitter can do and Salvador Perez the idea of how many home runs a catcher can hit. It was a season in which the NL's MVP vote is a toss-up among three players (Bryce Harper, Soto and Fernando Tatis Jr.) and its Cy Young vote among four (Walker Buehler, Corbin Burnes, Scherzer and Zack Wheeler). One in which 106 victories buys a one-game playoff, 100 a date with the Yankees or Red Sox, and 52 not even the No. 1 pick in the draft (sorry, Arizona).

          At 7:06 p.m. ET, at the end of the Mariners' 3-hour, 56-minute slog to a year, the final pitch of the 2021 regular season was thrown and the final out secured.

          The binary of playoffs/no playoffs ended the same as it always seems to end. Chaos, that inveterate tease, was nowhere to be seen -- but, in the end, that was fine. There are plenty more stories to be told this postseason.