September's MLB races are as crowded as they've been in years

Major League Baseball enters the final month of its regular season with an unusually crowded set of races, a Triple Crown bid that cooled and then steadied, and a defending champion that has spent August looking nothing like one.

Houston's Yordan Alvarez heads into September leading the majors in batting average, home runs and RBIs, putting him within reach of the first Triple Crown since Miguel Cabrera's in 2012. Alvarez cooled noticeably in August, batting .287 with just two home runs after a torrid first half, narrowing the gap between him and challengers in all three categories. He still holds the lead in each, but a strong final month is no longer a formality; it is a requirement, both for the Triple Crown and for an MVP case that had, earlier in the summer, looked close to settled.

An MVP race reshuffled by absence

That MVP conversation has been upended less by what Shohei Ohtani has done than by what he has not been able to do. The Dodgers slugger and pitcher, sidelined from the mound since early July by soreness in his left knee and right biceps, was shut down further over the past week because of what the team described as general fatigue, and he enters September in a lengthy slump without a home run in weeks. Chicago Cubs outfielder Pete Crow-Armstrong has moved into the front of the conversation instead, pursuing both a rare double-digit WAR season and membership in the 40-40 club, a combination that has made him difficult to ignore even in a league that spent the first half of the season fixated on Ohtani.

The Dodgers' broader August was not much kinder than Ohtani's. Los Angeles averaged well under four runs a game for the month, with Mookie Betts hitting .257 and Freddie Freeman going homerless for an extended stretch, an offensive slide that has made the defending champions look considerably more mortal heading into October positioning than their roster would suggest on paper.

Division and wild-card races bunched tight

Houston's AL West lead has coincided with an unusually soft division, where several contenders sit near or below .500, raising the possibility that a team without a winning record could still claim a division title or the last wild-card berth. The American League wild-card picture is similarly congested, with the Yankees, Guardians, Orioles and Rangers all within a handful of games of the final spot, while the Rays hold a narrow lead over the Yankees atop the AL East.

The National League is no less tangled. The Braves lead the NL East, but the Phillies, who had the best record in baseball for the month of August, sit only a few games back with a full month to close the gap. In the wild-card race, the Padres and Diamondbacks are locked in a season series that has finished dead even, setting up a fight for the final playoff spot that could plausibly be decided in the last weekend of the regular season.

Underneath the playoff jockeying, Milwaukee rookie right-hander Jacob Misiorowski has quietly put together one of the more dominant pitching seasons of the year, holding opponents to a .150 batting average against him with a 1.73 ERA and 222 strikeouts, numbers that have him within reach of modern-era records for opponent batting average. With the postseason set to begin Sept. 29, September's remaining games carry outsized weight: for Alvarez's pursuit of history, for a suddenly wide-open MVP race, and for a stretch of contenders bunched closely enough that a single hot or cold week could still decide who is playing in October.