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Tag: Wild card

  • Orlando City, Columbus Crew meet in pivotal pre-playoff matchup

    (Photo credit: Katie Stratman-Imagn Images)

    Orlando City and the Columbus Crew will meet in Central Florida on Saturday night in a match that will be critical for both teams’ playoff positioning.

    All nine Eastern Conference MLS Cup Playoff participants have already been finalized more than two weeks ahead of the final day of regular-season play on Oct. 18.

    But both seventh-place Orlando (14-7-10, 52 points) and ninth-place Columbus (13-8-11, 50 points) are still fighting to avoid the East wild-card game, which will be between the teams finishing in eighth and ninth.

    For much of the season, Columbus looked on track to be competing for the higher East positions.

    But after a stretch of only one win and six points earned in the last seven matches, manager Wilfried Nancy’s side would face a must-win wild-card match on the road if the postseason began now. With only two games left on the schedule, Nancy is trying to impart to his team that it still has the quality of the side that took 24 points from its first 11 games.

    ‘We are qualified for the playoffs,’ Nancy said, ‘because of the way we started the season. And this we have to think about it. … We are qualified because we had the best start of the season in the club’s history. So they can not forget that.’

    Nancy also suggested leading scorer Diego Rossi is questionable this week after missing the last three matches.

    Orlando’s trajectory has been the reverse, with the Lions at one point winning four straight league games through July and August.

    More recently, the team has used stoppage-time goals from Duncan McGuire and Alex Freeman, respectively, to earn dramatic late results in a 3-2 home win over Nashville on Sept. 20 and a 1-1 draw at FC Cincinnati last Sunday.

    Orlando City have also won three in a row at home and could move as high as fifth with a fourth consecutive home victory and other favorable results Saturday. Orlando also has a match in hand on Charlotte and Nashville, the current fifth- and sixth-place sides.

    ‘It’s something that at the beginning of the season was a challenge, but now we have that record that inspires us,’ Orlando manager Oscar Pareja said of that recent home form. ‘The boys were talking about it … how important the game is, but how important it is to play it in front of our people.’

    –Field Level Media

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  • Could South Carolina Change Everything?

    Could South Carolina Change Everything?

    For more than four decades, South Carolina has been the decisive contest in the Republican presidential primaries—the state most likely to anoint the GOP’s eventual nominee. On Saturday, South Carolina seems poised to play that role again.

    Since the state moved to its prominent early position on the GOP presidential-primary calendar in 1980, the candidate who has won there has captured the nomination in every contested race except one. Given Donald Trump’s overall lead in the GOP race, a victory for him in South Carolina over Nikki Haley, the state’s former governor, would likely uphold that streak.

    “We all underestimate how deeply ingrained the Trump message is in the rank and file of our party,” Warren Tompkins, a longtime South Carolina–based GOP strategist and lobbyist, told me. “Take the personality out of it: What he stands for, what he says he’ll do, and what he did as president; he’s on the money.”

    This year, though, there may be a twist in South Carolina’s usual role of confirming the eventual GOP winner: Even as the state demonstrates Trump’s strength in the primary, it may also spotlight his potential difficulties as a general-election nominee. Like the first contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, South Carolina may show that though most Republican voters are ready to renominate Trump, a substantial minority of the GOP coalition has grown disaffected from him. And in a general-election rematch, that could provide a crucial opening for President Joe Biden, despite all of his vulnerabilities, to attract some ordinarily Republican-leaning voters.

    “Trump is essentially the incumbent leader of the party who is not able to get higher than, say, 65 percent” in the primaries, Alex Stroman, a former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party, told me.

    Local observers say Haley has run a textbook South Carolina campaign, barnstorming the state in a bus, appearing relentlessly on national television, spending heavily on television advertising, and notably intensifying her criticism of Trump as “unhinged” and “diminished.” Trump, meanwhile, has breezed through the state as quickly as a snowbird motoring down I-95 from New York to Florida for the winter. Yet he has retained an imposing lead reaching as high as two to one over Haley in the polls.

    “I think you can argue Haley is running a fantastic campaign” in South Carolina, Jordan Ragusa, a political scientist at the College of Charleston and a co-author of a history of the South Carolina primary, told me. “But the pool of available voters is just so small that no matter what she does, it’s going to be hard for her to move the needle.”

    Over the past generation, South Carolina has had an extraordinary impact in shaping the outcome of GOP presidential-nomination contests. The state moved near the front of the GOP primary calendar in 1980, when Republicans were just establishing themselves as a competitive force in the state. GOP leaders created the primary, with its unusual scheduling on a Saturday, as a way to generate more attention for the party, which had previously selected its delegates at a convention attended by party insiders.

    The other key factor in creating the primary was support from Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign, including Lee Atwater, a prominent GOP strategist then based in South Carolina. South Carolina did what Atwater hoped when Reagan won it in a rout, after unexpectedly losing the Iowa caucus to George H. W. Bush.

    Reagan’s victory in South Carolina placed him back on the path for the GOP nomination and cut a mold that has endured, with only one exception, in every contested GOP presidential-primary race through 2016. Each of those races followed the same formula: One candidate won the Iowa caucus, a second candidate won the New Hampshire primary, and then one of those two won South Carolina and eventually captured the nomination. (The exception came in 2012, when a backlash to a debate question about his marriage propelled Newt Gingrich to a decisive South Carolina win over Mitt Romney, who recovered to claim the nomination.)

    In 2016, Trump’s narrow victory in South Carolina effectively cemented the nomination for him after he had lost Iowa to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and then recovered to win in New Hampshire. A victory for Trump on Saturday would allow him to equal a feat achieved only by incumbent GOP presidents: sweeping Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

    Three factors, above all, explain South Carolina’s enduring influence in the GOP race. One is that it reflects the overall Republican coalition better than either of the two states that precede it. In Iowa, the Republican electorate leans heavily toward evangelical Christians who prioritize social issues; in New Hampshire, where there are few evangelicals, economic conservatives focused on taxes and spending, as well as a sizable group of libertarian voters, have dominated. South Carolina is the synthesis of both: It has a large evangelical population and a substantial cohort of suburban, business-oriented Republicans outside its three principal population centers of Greenville, Columbia, and Charleston.

    “In a lot of ways, the state party here is a microcosm of the national party,” Jim Guth, a longtime political scientist at Furman University, in Greenville, told me. “We replicate the profile of the national party maybe better than New Hampshire [or] Iowa.”

    It has been possible for candidates over the years to win Iowa or New Hampshire primarily by mobilizing just one group, such as social conservatives in Iowa and moderate independents in New Hampshire. But because the South Carolina GOP contains so many different power centers, “you have to have a broader appeal,” Tompkins, who has worked in every GOP presidential primary since Reagan, told me.

    The second key factor in South Carolina’s importance has been its placement on the GOP calendar. From the outset, in 1980, the primary was designed by its sponsors as a “First in the South” contest that they hoped would signal to voters across the region which candidate had emerged as the favorite. As more southern states over the years concentrated their primaries on Super Tuesday, in early March, that multiplied the domino effect of winning the state.

    “Given the demographic alignment between South Carolina and a lot of the southern Super Tuesday states, and the momentum effect, it really made South Carolina pivotal,” Ragusa said.

    The third dynamic underpinning South Carolina’s influence has been its role as a fire wall against insurgent candidates such as John McCain in 2000 and Patrick J. Buchanan in the 1990s. South Carolina’s Republican leadership has usually coalesced predominantly behind the candidate with the most support from the national party establishment and then helped power them to victory in the state. That model wavered in 2012, when Gingrich won his upset victory, and even in 2016, when Trump won despite clear splits in the national GOP establishment about his candidacy. But most often, South Carolina has been an empire-strikes-back place where the establishment-backed front-runner in the race snuffs out the last flickers of viable opposition.

    All of these historic factors appear virtually certain to benefit Trump this year. Super Tuesday no longer revolves as much around southern states. But it remains a huge landscape: 15 states and American Samoa will all pick a combined 874 Republican delegates on March 5, nearly three-fourths of the total required to win the nomination.

    In the limited polling across the Super Tuesday states, Trump now leads, usually commandingly, in all of them. Haley has already announced campaign appearances in Super Tuesday states through next week. But with all of the Super Tuesday states voting just 10 days after South Carolina, it will be virtually impossible for Haley to close the gap in so many places at once without winning her home state or at least significantly exceeding expectations. Like earlier underdogs, she faces a stark equation: To change the race anywhere on Super Tuesday, she must change it everywhere through her showing in South Carolina.

    Saturday’s result could also reconfirm South Carolina’s other key historic roles. Trump is now the candidate of most of the GOP establishment—a dynamic reflected in his endorsement by virtually all of the leading Republicans in Haley’s home state. He’s also become the contender with the broadest appeal inside the Republican Party. Because Trump is so polarizing for the general public, it’s difficult to see him in that light. But South Carolina is likely to buttress the indications from Iowa and New Hampshire that Trump, as a quasi-incumbent, now has a broader reach across the Republican Party than Haley does, or, for that matter, than he himself did in 2016. In most South Carolina polls, Trump is now leading her with every major demographic group, except among the independents who plan to participate in the primary.

    Yet South Carolina, like Iowa and New Hampshire before it, will also provide important clues about the extent of the remaining resistance to Trump within the Republican coalition.

    Haley is likely to perform best among well-educated voters around the population centers of Columbia and Charleston. “Haley must run up the score with traditional Reagan Republicans who want to actually nominate a candidate who can win in the general election,” Stroman told me. “She is going to be absolutely swamped in the MAGA-rich right-wing upstate, and in rural areas across the state—so she needs the suburbs and cities to turn out to hopefully keep her closer than expected.”

    In New Hampshire, Haley finished closer to Trump than most polls projected, because a large number of independent voters, and even a slice of Democrats, turned out to support her.  She’ll need a similar dynamic to finish credibly in South Carolina, where she has said her goal is to exceed her 43 percent of the vote in New Hampshire. The better the showing for Haley among independents, and among college-educated voters in the suburbs, the stronger the general-election warning signs for Trump.

    Democratic voters could be a wild card on Saturday after relatively few of them turned out for the party’s own primary earlier this month. South Carolina does not have party registration, which means that any voter who did not participate in the Democratic primary can vote in the Republican contest. A group called Primary Pivot has launched a campaign to encourage Democrats and independents to swarm the GOP primary to weaken Trump. If Haley exceeds expectations in South Carolina, it will be because, as in New Hampshire, more independents and Democrats turn out for her than pollsters anticipated.

    Besting Trump for the nomination may no longer be a realistic goal for Haley if she loses her home state. But, after mostly dodging confrontation with Trump for months, she is now delivering a more cogent and caustic argument against him, and showing a determination to force Republicans to wrestle with the general-election risks they are accepting by renominating him. The biggest question in South Carolina may not be whether Haley can beat Trump, but whether the state provides her more evidence, even in defeat, to make that case.

    Ronald Brownstein

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  • Winter Illness This Year Is a Different Kind of Ugly

    Winter Illness This Year Is a Different Kind of Ugly

    Earlier this month, Taison Bell walked into the intensive-care unit at UVA Health and discovered that half of the patients under his care could no longer breathe on their own. All of them had been put on ventilators or high-flow oxygen. “It was early 2022 the last time I saw that,” Bell, an infectious-disease and critical-care physician at the hospital, told me—right around the time that the original Omicron variant was ripping through the region and shattering COVID-case records. This time, though, the coronavirus, flu, and RSV were coming together to fill UVA’s wards—“all at the same time,” Bell said.

    Since COVID’s arrival, experts have been fearfully predicting a winter worst: three respiratory-virus epidemics washing over the U.S. at once. Last year, those fears didn’t really play out, Sam Scarpino, an infectious-disease modeler at Northeastern University, told me. But this year, “we’re set up for that to happen,” as RSV, flu, and COVID threaten to crest in near synchrony. The situation is looking grim enough that the CDC released an urgent call last Thursday for more vaccination for all three pathogens—the first time it has struck such a note on seasonal immunizations since the pandemic began.

    Nationwide, health-care systems aren’t yet in crisis mode. Barring an unexpected twist in viral evolution, a repeat of that first terrible Omicron winter seems highly unlikely. Nor is the U.S. necessarily fated for an encore of last year’s horrors, when enormous, early waves of RSV, then flu, slammed the country, filling pediatric emergency departments and ICUs past capacity, to the point where some hospitals began to pitch temporary tents outside to accommodate overflow. On the contrary, more so than any other year since SARS-CoV-2 appeared, our usual respiratory viruses “seem to be kind of getting back to their old patterns” with regard to timing and magnitude, Kathryn Edwards, a vaccine and infectious-disease expert at Vanderbilt University, told me.

    But even so-so seasons of RSV, flu, and SARS-CoV-2 could create catastrophe if piled on top of one another. “It really doesn’t take much for any of these three viruses to tip the scale and strain hospitals,” Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer, told me. It also—in theory—shouldn’t take much to waylay the potential health-care crisis ahead. For the first time in history, the U.S. is offering vaccines against flu, COVID, and RSV: “We have three opportunities to prevent three different viral infections,” Grace Lee, a pediatrician at Stanford, told me. And yet, Americans have all but ignored the shots being offered to them.

    So far, flu-shot uptake is undershooting last year’s rate. According to recent polls, as many as half of surveyed Americans probably or definitely aren’t planning to get this year’s updated COVID-19 vaccine. RSV shots, approved for older adults in May and for pregnant people in August, have been struggling to get a foothold at all. Distributed to everyone eligible to receive them, this trifecta of shots could keep as many as hundreds of thousands of Americans out of emergency departments and ICUs this year. But that won’t happen if people continue to shirk protection. The specific tragedy of this coming winter will be that any suffering was that much more avoidable.

    Much of the agony of last year’s respiratory season can be chalked up to a terrible combination of timing and intensity. A wave of RSV hit the nation early and hard, peaking in November and leaving hospitals no time to recover before flu—also ahead of schedule—soared toward a December maximum. Children bore the brunt of these onslaughts, after spending years protected from respiratory infections by pandemic mitigations. “When masks came down, infections went up,” Lee told me. Babies and toddlers were falling seriously sick with their first respiratory illnesses—but so were plenty of older kids who had skipped the typical infections of infancy. With the health-care workforce still burnt out and substantially pared down from a pandemic exodus, hospitals ended up overwhelmed. “We just did not have enough capacity to take care of the kids we wanted to be able to take care of,” Lee said. Providers triaged cases over the phone; parents spent hours cradling their sick kids in packed waiting rooms.

    And yet, one of the biggest fears about last year’s season didn’t unfold: waves of RSV, flu, and COVID cresting all at once. COVID’s winter peak didn’t come until January, after RSV and flu had substantially died down. Now, though, RSV is hovering around the high it has maintained for weeks, COVID hospitalizations have been on a slow but steady rise, and influenza, after simmering in near-total quietude, seems to be “really taking off,” Scarpino told me. None of the three viruses has yet approached last season’s highs. But a confluence of all of them would be more than many hospitals could take. Across the country, many emergency departments and ICUs are nearing or at capacity. “We’re treading water okay right now,” Sallie Permar, the chief pediatrician at Weill Cornell Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, told me. “Add much more, and we’re thrown into a similar situation as last year.”

    That forecast isn’t certain. RSV, which has been dancing around a national peak, could start quickly declining; flu could take its time to reach an apex. COVID, too, remains a wild card: It has not yet settled into a predictable pattern of ebb and flow, and won’t necessarily maintain or exceed its current pace. This season may still be calmer than last, and impacts of these diseases similarly, or even more, spaced out.

    But several experts told me that they think substantial overlap in the coming weeks is a likely scenario. Timing is ripe for spread, with the holiday season in full swing and people rushing through travel hubs on the way to family gatherings. Masking and testing rates remain low, and many people are back to shrugging off symptoms, heading to work or school or social events while potentially still infectious. Nor do the viruses themselves seem to be cutting us a break. Last year’s flu season, for instance, was mostly dominated by a single strain, H3N2. This year, multiple flu strains of different types appear to be on a concomitant rise, making it that much more likely that people will catch some version of the virus, or even multiple versions in quick succession. The health-care workforce is, in many ways, in better shape this year. Staffing shortages aren’t quite as dire, Permar told me, and many experts are better prepared to deal with multiple viruses at once, especially in pediatric care. Kids are also more experienced with these bugs than they were this time last year. But masking is no longer as consistent a fixture in health-care settings as it was even at the start of 2023. And should RSV, flu, and COVID flood communities simultaneously, new issues—including co-infections, which remain poorly understood—could arise. (Other respiratory illnesses are still circulating too.) There’s a lot experts just can’t anticipate: We simply haven’t yet had a year when these three viruses have truly inundated us at once.

    Vaccines, of course, would temper some of the trouble—which is part of the reason the CDC issued its clarion call, Houry told me. But Americans don’t seem terribly interested in getting the shots they’re eligible for. Flu-shot uptake is down across all age groups compared with last year—even among older adults and pregnant people, who are at especially high risk. And although COVID vaccination is bumping along at a comparable pace to 2022, the rates remain “atrocious,” Bell told me, especially among children. RSV vaccines have reached just 17 percent of the population over the age of 60. Among pregnant people, the other group eligible for the vaccines, uptake has been stymied by delays and confusion over whether they qualify. Some of Permar’s pregnant physician colleagues have been turned away from pharmacies, she told me, or been told their shots might not be covered by insurance. “And then some of those same parents have babies who end up in the hospital with RSV,” she said. Infants were also supposed to be able to get a passive form of immunity from monoclonal antibodies. But those drugs have been scarce nationwide, forcing providers to restrict their use to babies at highest risk—yet another way in which actual protection against respiratory disease has fallen short of potential. “There was a lot of excitement and hope that the monoclonal was going to be the answer and that everybody could get it,” Edwards told me. “But then it became very apparent that this just functionally wasn’t going to be able to happen.”

    Last year, at least some of the respiratory-virus misery had become inevitable: After the U.S. dropped pandemic mitigations, pathogens were fated to come roaring back. The early arrivals of RSV and flu (especially on the heels of an intense summer surge of enterovirus and rhinovirus) also left little time for people to prepare. And of course, RSV vaccines weren’t yet around. This year, though, timing has been kinder, immunity stronger, and our arsenal of tools better supplied. High uptake of shots would undoubtedly lower rates of severe disease and curb community spread; it would preserve hospital capacity, and make schools and workplaces and travel hubs safer to move through. Waves of illness would peak lower and contract faster. Some might never unfold at all.

    But so far, we’re collectively squandering our chance to shore up our defense. “It’s like we’re rushing into battle without armor,” Bell told me, even though local officials have been begging people to ready themselves for months. Which all makes this year feel terrible in a different kind of way. Whatever happens in the coming weeks and months will be a worse version of what it could have been—a season of opportunities missed.

    Katherine J. Wu

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  • Adolis García’s HR in 11th, Corey Seager’s tying shot in 9th rally Rangers past D-backs 6-5 in Series opener

    Adolis García’s HR in 11th, Corey Seager’s tying shot in 9th rally Rangers past D-backs 6-5 in Series opener

    By Stephen Hawkins

    Adolis García hit an opposite-field homer in the 11th inning, after Corey Seager’s tying two-run shot in the ninth, and the Texas Rangers opened this surprise World Series of wild-card teams with a 6-5 victory over the Arizona Diamondbacks on Friday night.

    The Cuban slugger known as El Bombi hit a 3-1 pitch from Miguel Castro into the right-field seats beyond the glove of a leaping Corbin Carroll. It was García’s second RBI of the game, setting a record for most in one postseason with 22nd.

    García has homered in five consecutive games, tied for the second-longest streak in postseason history, and he delivered the first walk-off homer in a World Series game since Max Muncy connected leading off the 18th inning for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2018 against Boston and Nathan Eovaldi, who started for the Rangers in this one.

    Texas became the first team to win a World Series game when trailing by multiple runs in the ninth inning since the Kansas City Royals in their title-clinching Game 5 over the New York Mets in 2015.

    Game 2 is Saturday night in Texas.

    Seager tied the game in the ninth when he drove closer Paul Sewald’s 94 mph fastball 419 feet deep into the right-field seats for a two-run shot.

    Associated Press

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  • Tylor Megill’s dominates as Mets take series-opener over Phillies

    Tylor Megill’s dominates as Mets take series-opener over Phillies

    After a week of rain and rain-related storylines, the Mets were finally able to play a game without incident. Tylor Megill turned in a season-best performance with 7 1/3 innings and the Mets defeated the Phillies 4-3 in the opening game.

    It was a game that mattered little for both teams. The NL East was decided long ago with the Atlanta Braves clinching the title for the second year in a row, and the Phillies having clinched the top NL Wild Card playoff spot earlier in the week. They have a six-game lead over the Arizona Cardinals. The Mets, of course, were officially eliminated from playoff contention last week in Philadelphia.

    But finishing this weekend strong still means something for the Mets, and they beat up a pitcher who used to be one of their own in the matinee game. Taijuan Walker (15-6) was tagged for four earned runs in a seven-inning outing. The Mets scored three runs in the first inning and Omar Narvaez made it 4-0 in the second with a leadoff homer, only his second round-tripper of the season.

    Megill (9-18) was the star. In his final performance of the season, the right-hander went deeper than he had all year, carrying a scoreless outing into the eighth inning. Megill gave up back-to-back singles before getting the first out and being replaced by Brooks Raley.

    The expectations around Megill were high this season and he struggled to perform. He was even demoted to Triple-A at one point. All year, the Mets tried to figure out why Megill and his left-handed counterpart David Peterson had regressed.

    But Megill limited the Phillies to one earned run on four hits, walked two and struck out seven Saturday. He has worked to get his ERA under 5.00 and did exactly that, lowering it to 4.70.

    He came off the field to an ovation from the fans. Left-hander Raley allowed the inherited runner to score, cutting the Mets lead to 4-1.

    The Phillies threatened in the ninth, taking two runs off Adam Ottavino. Weston Wilson was advantageous on the basepaths, stealing second and third with only putting only one out. But Ottavino struck out Jake Cave and Christian Pache hit one right to Rafael Ortega in center field and Ottavino converted his 12th save.

    Abbey Mastracco

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  • Mets game suspended after blowing save to Marlins, 3-hour rain delay

    Mets game suspended after blowing save to Marlins, 3-hour rain delay

    When it rains, it pours for the Mets.

    Thursday’s game against the Miami Marlins was suspended after a three-hour, 17-minute rain delay, which began moments after the Mets blew a ninth-inning save to fall behind 2-1 at Citi Field.

    The Mets are eliminated from postseason contention, but the Marlins hold a half-game lead for the third and final NL Wild Card spot over the Chicago Cubs, who lost Thursday to the Atlanta Braves.

    This weekend will determine whether the Mets-Marlins’ series finale does indeed need to be completed.

    Miami is scheduled to begin a three-game series in Pittsburgh on Friday. The Cubs are set to play three games in Milwaukee this weekend.

    The Marlins possess the tiebreaker over the Cubs after winning their season series.

    Thursday’s game likely would’ve ended without a rain delay had the Mets converted the ninth-inning save. But leading 1-0, manager Buck Showalter turned to reliever Anthony Kay with one on and one out, replacing Grant Hartwig, who had pitched 1.1 scoreless innings to that point.

    Kay, a Long Island native, then surrendered back-to-back RBI doubles to Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Yuli Gurriel, the first two batters he faced.

    The downpour intensified shortly afterward.

    The Mets and Marlins split a doubleheader Wednesday after rain left the field unplayable Tuesday.

    Thursday’s bullpen implosion followed a stellar start by the Mets’ David Peterson, who hurled seven shutout innings and struck out eight. Peterson, who entered with a 5.37 ERA, traded zeroes throughout the night with another lefty, Miami’s Jesus Luzardo, who struck out 10 over 7.1 innings.

    The Mets wasted the eighth-inning heroics of Rafeal Ortega, whose RBI single against reliever Andrew Nardi broke a scoreless tie. Ortega had entered the game in the fifth inning for Brandon Nimmo, who dove awkwardly in center field.

    The surprising Marlins, who won fewer than 70 games in both of the past two years, are seeking their first playoff berth since 2020, when they went 31-29 during the COVID-shortened season. Their last time making the playoffs after a full regular season was 2003, when they won the World Series over the Yankees.

    The Mets are scheduled this weekend to host a three-game series against the Philadelphia Phillies, who have clinched the top NL Wild Card

    Peter Sblendorio

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