ALDS, NLDS storylines, how to watch for October 9, 2024

Four games! Four games! One of the many, many reasons it’s terrific that we’ll have no sweeps in any of the Division Series — after having three of them in the Wild Card Series — is that it sets up a glorious day like Wednesday, when we have four baseball games. It’s the final time we’ll have that many all season. Savor it.

Two of these are pivotal Game 3s, but the other two have even higher stakes: For one team, it’s a potential clinch. For the other? It’s a win-or-go-home situation. This is as good as baseball gets, folks.

Here’s the top storyline for each of Wednesday’s Division Series games.

What will the Guardians get out of Cobb?

It has been a tough year for Cobb, who just turned 37 on Monday. A 2023 All-Star with the Giants, he has been ravaged by injuries this year, from hip surgery to a nerve issue in his right shoulder to a blister to a split fingernail to another blister. He has made only three starts all season, but it should be said: They’ve been good starts. The best was the last one he made, on Sept. 1, when he threw six stellar innings (two hits, one unearned run, six K’s) in a 6-1 win over the Pirates.

But you might note from the date there: It’s been a while since that game, thanks to the aforementioned fingernail and blister issues. (It’s also been a while since Cobb appeared in the postseason – 11 years, to be exact.)

The Tigers are deploying the “pitching chaos” strategy they have been leaning on in games not started by Tarik Skubal. But if Cobb – who, again, has not pitched in more than a month – isn’t ready to go and give the Guardians some real innings, they will essentially be trying some “pitching chaos” of their own.

Is this really going to be it for the Phillies?

This is supposed to be the year for a Phillies team that has been in full-on, win-now mode. They reached the World Series two years ago but lost to the Astros; last year, they came within one game of returning to the Fall Classic before a shocking exit against the D-backs in the NLCS. That put a lot of emphasis on 2024 for this veteran team that is still searching for that ring.

That’s especially the case for Bryce Harper, the two-time MVP Award winner, likely future Hall of Famer and signature MLB star, who famously left the Nationals the year before they won their World Series in 2019. Every major star on this team, from Harper to Kyle Schwarber to Trea Turner to Nick Castellanos to Zack Wheeler to Aaron Nola to even Carlos Estévez is at least 31 years old. As your back might have told you when you got out of bed this morning, age is undefeated.

The 2024 Phillies had the franchise’s best record since 2011 and have been prepping themselves for the postseason since Spring Training. They now are one game — in front of what is going to be an absolutely bonkers Citi Field crowd — from it all vanishing, just like that.

Will the superstars ever get going?

It was almost a relief when, in the eighth inning of Game 2, Aaron Judge finally got a base hit. Sure, it was an infield single, but man, he will take it. Judge, who, again, may have just had the best season at the plate by a right-handed hitter in baseball history, had been 0-for-6 in the series (with two walks and four strikeouts) before that at-bat, and his struggles are becoming an unfortunate postseason motif. In his last 16 postseason games, he’s 9-for-63 (.143) with three homers and 24 strikeouts. Those are not the sort of numbers New York City fans love!

In the other dugout, Bobby Witt Jr. — Judge’s only reasonable competitor for the AL MVP Award — has somehow gone 0-for-10 for with four strikeouts in the two ALDS games. That’s actually the first time he has gone hitless in two straight games since Aug. 29-30. (He only had two 0-for-5 games all season long.) This has been a riveting series already despite the two best players in the American League not doing much of anything. Imagine what it’ll look like when they wake up.

Déjà vu for the Dodgers?

The Dodgers have won the National League West in 11 out of the past 12 seasons. They are one of the best-run organizations in all of sports. They have three supernova MVPs atop their lineup, including Shohei Ohtani, who’s so obviously excited to finally be in the playoffs he’s nearly leaping out of his spikes.

But now they find themselves in the exact same position as in the past two seasons: In danger of getting knocked out of the NLDS by a division rival. Last year, it was the D-backs. In 2022, it was the Padres, who bounced back from a Game 1 loss to take three straight games, clinching in Game 4 in San Diego. That roadmap now looks eerily familiar, and the worst part about this series is that, all told, Game 3 didn’t go so badly for Los Angeles. Walker Buehler gutted through five innings — giving up runs in only one of those — and the three relievers who followed him were perfect. Mookie Betts homered and Teoscar Hernández walloped a grand slam to put five runs on Padres starter Michael King.

But there were familiar October problems for the Dodgers, too. Shaky defense contributed to the Padres putting up a six-spot in the second inning, and after Hernández’s slam, the club got only one more hit the rest of the game — a truly terrible time for the bats to suddenly go ice cold. Now, if the Dodgers want their season to last to Friday, they have to spackle together their pitching staff, deal with injuries to first baseman Freddie Freeman and shortstop Miguel Rojas, and overcome a Petco Park crowd that I’m pretty sure can be heard from space. The Dodgers are back here. Again. It looks like an even tougher hill for them to climb than the last two years … and we saw how it turned out then.