October 03, 2012|By Childs Walker and Kevin Rector, The Baltimore Sun
If the Orioles beat the Rangers, they would play the Yankees in a best-of-five Division Series, with the first two games at Camden Yards on Sunday and Monday and the last three scheduled for Yankee Stadium on Wednesday, next Thursday and Friday, Oct.12.
In a season defined by extra-inning victories, it seemed only appropriate that the Orioles had to wait until the end of the final day to learn their postseason fate. Going into Wednesday, they faced a mind-bending array of possibilities involving three of the other four teams in the AL playoffs.
If they had won and the Yankees had lost, they would have played a divisional tiebreaker in Baltimore tonight and then, depending on the outcome of that game, faced the possibility of a wild-card game in Baltimore on Friday. If they and the Yankees had both won Wednesday, the Orioles would have hosted either the Rangers or the Oakland Athletics on Friday for the wild-card game. If the Orioles had lost Wednesday, they would have traveled to either Texas or Oakland for the Friday game.
Got all that?
Commissioner Bud Selig added a second wild-card team to each league's playoff picture at the beginning of this season, hoping to create hope for more teams and more excitement at the end of the regular season.
Though it was mostly clear at the beginning of the week which teams would be in the playoffs, the possible matchups remained a fascinating brain-teaser for fans. And there was real incentive for teams to win their divisions and avoid the one-game crucible of the wild-card round.
Still, just getting into the postseason is exciting for the Orioles.
“They're looking forward to the opportunity and heading down to Texas and playing,” manager Buck Showalter said of his players after the game. “It's a tough road however you do it. It's a challenge. We feel real good about the opportunity that we have earned by being one of the five [AL] teams left.”
The Orioles have already succeeded beyond most fans' wildest expectations. They were 69-93 last season, with only one winning month. And in the offseason, they changed top baseball executives again, hiring Dan Duquette, who had been out of the major leagues for almost 10 years. Most Orioles watchers regarded a 15th straight losing season as a near-certainty.
Instead, the club jumped to a quick start, remained above .500 through the summer and played its best baseball of the season in the last two months, the time when so many recent Orioles teams collapsed.
These Orioles have seemed impregnable in one-run and extra-inning games and have been able to patch any hole, sometimes with a sensational rookie such as third baseman Manny Machado, sometimes with reclamation projects such as left fielder Nate McLouth and starter Miguel Gonzalez.
As a reward, the Orioles reversed their record, finishing 93-69, and will play in the postseason for the first time since 1997, when they fell two agonizing games short of the World Series.
“The world is watching,” Jones said about the playoffs. “You're on the biggest stage. This is the position we put ourselves in. We had a really good regular season and we're fortunate enough to be extending our regular season and it's the situation we put ourselves in. We've got no choice. We've got to go out there and play the game. ... We're happy to be in that situation. We're just glad for the opportunity.”
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Baltimore Sun reporters Eduardo A. Encina and Peter Schmuck contributed to this article from St. Petersburg, Fla.
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