THE MORNING HORSEHIDE HERALD

THE OCTOBER DESK: THE WEST'S DEAD HEAT HOLDS, TORONTO'S CANDLE GOES OUT AT LAST — AND THE PALE HOSE AND THE FRIARS EACH STAND ONE RESULT FROM A BERTH

The American's West survived the wildest night of its dead heat unchanged — Houston beaten in ten at Seattle as the account above relates, Texas beaten at home by the eliminated Mets — so both clubs stand at eight-and-seventy wins with four to play and Houston's tiebreaker still governing. And the same day closed one ledger for good: Toronto, champion of the American League a year ago, was formally eliminated when the first game of the Baltimore twin bill went against it, the fall from pennant to autumn silence complete in a single calendar's turn.

The two nearest berths may be clinched this very day. The White Sox, beaten five-to-four at Kansas City on Garcia's seventh-inning double, need one victory or one Texas defeat to seat themselves in October for the first time since 2021 — the front office traveled to Kansas City Wednesday for what might have been the festivities, and got a lesson in presumption for its trouble. Their larger prize stays live besides: Cleveland's shutout defeat at Boston keeps the Central's gap at one game, and Chicago holds the season-series tiebreaker, seven games to six. In the National, San Diego's victory at Los Angeles put the Friars one step from the postseason — one win, or one Arizona defeat at Denver this afternoon, clinches — while the Cubs and Phillies both lost and sit knotted at seven-and-eighty wins for the second wild-card chair, Chicago holding the tiebreaker over Philadelphia and San Diego alike. Arizona, alive by its own hand, stands three back of the third chair with four to play.

One almanac note with October consequence: foul weather forecast for Boston has moved the Cubs' Saturday engagement forward, so Chicago now plays a separate-admission twin bill at Fenway Park on Friday — a scheduling hand the manager Counsell reckons was dealt against him, with his club still chasing its clinch. "It always kind of seems like the baseball gods are going to test you," said his pitcher Gausman, "and it always seems to come at a time when you don't want it to."

THE MILESTONE DESK: FOUR MEN NOW SHARE THE AMERICAN'S HOME-RUN CROWN AT ONE-AND-FORTY — AND SALE BANKS A NINTH SEASON OF TWO HUNDRED STRIKEOUTS

The American's home-run race, which began the week as one man's story, ended Wednesday as a four-part harmony. Pete Alonso — whose fortieth this paper sang on Tuesday to the strains of Earth, Wind & Fire — struck his one-and-fortieth in the twin bill's opener at Camden Yards, and by nightfall Ben Rice of the Yankees had hit two in a single game, his fortieth and one-and-fortieth, to draw level with Alonso, with Houston's Alvarez, and with Tampa Bay's Caminero. Four men, one number, four days remaining. Rice's pair carried its own footnote: the manager Boone had prophesied him thirty-nine home runs in the spring, and Rice took the figure as an insult to be avenged. "I was pretty close, but he went soaring past," Boone allowed. The young man is the thirteenth Yankee ever to reach forty, and only Judge and DiMaggio managed it within their first three seasons in that uniform. In the National the arithmetic holds one rung higher: Crow-Armstrong and Schwarber share the lead at five-and-forty, with Atlanta's Olson joining the one-and-forty club Wednesday by a blow of his own.

At Truist Park, Chris Sale struck out ten Cincinnati batsmen in his final tuning before October and, with the last of them, banked his two-hundredth strikeout of the year — the ninth season of two hundred in his career, a company few living arms keep. He had ended the fifth inning at 199 and asked to go back out. "I told myself before this game that I really wanted to make it feel like a playoff game," said the southpaw, who takes the ball for the first game of the Wild Card round Tuesday. The evening asked more of him than strikeouts, as the colors desk below records.

THE FAREWELL DESK: APPEARANCE FIVE HUNDRED, AND AN ANNOUNCEMENT WITHIN DAYS — SCHERZER POINTS THE FINGER AT HIMSELF AND ASKS FOR THE BALL ONE MORE SUNDAY

Max Scherzer took the mound at Baltimore Wednesday for the five-hundredth appearance of his career — the four-hundred-ninety-first of them a start — and left it beaten, four runs in five innings, undone chiefly by Alonso's milestone blow. Afterward the two-and-forty-year-old said plainly that he will likely have something to say about his future within a day or two, and that he hopes to return on short rest for Sunday's season finale. The self-accounting he offered meanwhile was the old competitor's, unsoftened: "Instead of pointing the finger at everybody else, I'll point the finger at myself and what I've done this year. I got beat on one pitch here. I feel like I've said that a lot, but that's the big leagues."

The week thus carries two farewells in close formation: Verlander's final start comes Saturday at Detroit, as this paper recorded Wednesday, and Scherzer's reckoning — whatever he announces — follows hard upon. Two of the age's great right arms, whose duels ornamented a decade of Octobers, reaching the same page of the calendar together; the Herald will keep both accounts with care.

THE HERALD LOWERS ITS COLORS: DON COOPER, WHO TAUGHT THE SOUTH SIDE ITS PITCHING FOR THREE-AND-THIRTY YEARS, IS DEAD AT SEVENTY

Word came Wednesday, confirmed by his family, that Don Cooper — Coop to every man who ever threw a baseball in his sight — has died at seventy. He served the White Sox organization three-and-thirty seasons from 1988 through 2020, eighteen of them as the big club's pitching coach, and his monument is the 2005 championship staff that threw four consecutive complete games in the League Championship Series before sweeping the World Series — a feat of preparation as much as of arms. The testimony poured in from his fraternity: Contreras, who said losing him felt like losing family; Konerko, who remembered a man who "could talk somebody up into thinking they were good"; and Sale, who learned the news moments before his warmups Wednesday and went out and struck out ten. "I wouldn't be here without him," said the southpaw, whose first big-league pitching coach Cooper was.

That his passing came on a night his old organization stood a single result from its first October in five years is the kind of arithmetic Coop would have waved off with something fast-talking and unprintable. The Herald lowers its colors for a teacher of the craft: the game is subtracted by his going, and every pitcher he ever talked into believing himself good is the proof of what it gained by his staying so long.

THE INFIRMARY WARD: JUDGE VOWS THE BRONX WILL NOT OPEN OCTOBER WITHOUT HIM — RAFAELA'S RETURN LASTS SEVEN OUTS, AND GAUSMAN'S SHOULDER JOINS THE WATCH

Aaron Judge spoke Wednesday like a man arguing with a calendar. The captain, shelved Saturday with what his manager called a moderate strain of the right calf — the soleus, Judge specified, a muscle "a little more crucial with running and hitting" — received a plasma injection Monday and intends to be ready for the first game of the Wild Card round Tuesday in the Bronx. "The Bronx is a magical place in October," he said. "I don't want to miss out on that opportunity." Boone, after the nine-run evening entered on the card below, would rule nothing out: "We're going to listen to the body and see how he heals. If he's in a position to play, obviously we're going to want him."

At Boston the ward giveth and taketh in the same evening: Ceddanne Rafaela, back from three weeks on the shelf, opened the game with a diving, extra-base-robbing catch and lined a single in the second — then came up lame down the line, right hamstring tight, and was gone before the third. The pictures are ordered; the man himself professed little alarm. At Wrigley Field, Kevin Gausman left a fine outing with trouble in the left shoulder that his club prays does not linger, a subtraction the wild-card arithmetic can ill afford. And at Kansas City, Erick Fedde took a 104-mile-an-hour drive off the right calf in the second inning, pitched on, and limped to his locker afterward with clean X-rays — the White Sox will call it a bruise and a bargain.

THE CONVALESCENT DESK: THE VIGIL CLOSES WITH A LINE SINGLE TO RIGHT — OHTANI RETURNS TO THE CHAMPIONS' ORDER, AND CHAPMAN COMES BACK THROWING LIGHTNING

The watch this paper has kept over Shohei Ohtani — the named day, the manager's promise, the batting-order deliberations — closed Wednesday night at Chavez Ravine precisely as promised. Activated from his fifteen-day shelf-leave, batting second for the first time all year, he lined the evening's first plate appearance into right field for a single, walked in the third, and finished one-for-four in a defeat the card below records. The verdict wanted was health, not heroics, and health is what the eye reported: "There wasn't any chase," said the manager Roberts. "When you feel healthy and strong, you feel like you can just see the baseball, trust your eyes and take your swing. I thought that's what you saw tonight." The operations chief Friedman wants only at-bats now — "as many as we can, some rhythm and timing" — with five games to sharpen the sword before October.

At Fenway the convalescence ran ahead of schedule: Aroldis Chapman, silent since the thirteenth with a balky lat, returned to strike out the side — all three swinging, twelve pitches — for the four-hundred-second save of his career and five-and-thirtieth of the year. "I feel normal. I feel like I'm at a hundred percent right now," said the eight-and-thirty-year-old, and the Guardians who faced him offered no rebuttal.

THE CURIOSITIES DESK: A TWIN BILL UMPIRED BY TWINS — THE BROTHERS JONES MAKE HISTORY AT CAMDEN YARDS, AND A PITCHER IN AMARILLO CELEBRATES A PENNANT UPSIDE DOWN

The doubleheader at Baltimore carried a wonder in plain sight: Austin and Tyler Jones, identical twins of Charleston, became the first such pair ever to serve on the same umpiring crew in a Major League game — Austin at first base and Tyler at second for the opener, the two swapping stations for the nightcap. Umpires together since the age of fifteen, schooled together at eighteen, they had crossed paths professionally almost never in a dozen years of minor-league roads. "This is something we've dreamed about forever," said Tyler. That the twin bill they worked produced twin scores — Baltimore four, Toronto two, twice over, as the card below attests — is the sort of coincidence this paper declines to explain and simply enters in the book.

And in the Texas League, the Diamondbacks' young right-hander Alfred Morillo closed Double-A Amarillo's championship victory Wednesday with a 97-mile-an-hour strikeout — and then, as he did upon clinching the finals berth last week, turned a full standing backflip on the mound and stuck the landing. The parent club's manager Lovullo, shown the earlier rendition, reviewed it as an aesthete and a worrier at once: "That's pretty impressive. Yeah, that's hard to do."