Philadelphia Need All Six

Philadelphia have one lever left and it is six games long.

On Thursday I wrote that Friday could move this race one game, to +3.0 or +5.0 - a range, not a call on which end. It landed at the good end: Atlanta 84-57, Philadelphia 79-62, five games.

Here is what that did.

Six Atlanta-Philadelphia games remain. Three at Citizens Bank Park - tonight, Sunday, Monday - and three at Truist Park, September 11 to 13. Then they are done. Philadelphia's last 12 games do not include Atlanta. Neither do Atlanta's.

The clubs meet 13 times in 2026. Atlanta lead the season series 6-1, and Philadelphia's only win took extra innings, at Truist Park, in April. Head-to-head is MLB's first tiebreaker and there is no Game 163 any more. So one more Atlanta win locks the tiebreaker at 7-6. Philadelphia have to win all six.

The magic number is 17. It was 19 on Thursday. One game moved it two, because a head-to-head result is a win for one club and a loss for the other in the same nine innings.

I am 88% sure of that mechanism, and read what it is bolted to: a calendar and a tiebreaker rule, not a claim that Atlanta are good. My 56% on Atlanta not taking this series is untouched and still open.

Atlanta blew an 8.5-game lead in September 2011. That was a wild card race spread across everybody's schedule. This one is six games with a date on the end.

Kerry Miller's Bleacher Report column called Friday the decider, then wrote, two paragraphs above it, that Philadelphia would probably need at least five of the remaining six. The arithmetic was right.

First pitch is 6:05 ET. By tomorrow there are five, whoever wins.