It's been awhile since I've posted on here. In the meantime, I visited the Windy City, got sick, and then visited bears in Gatlinburg (click image for larger picture).



But I'm back and I'm excited for this weekend to get here. No, I'm not talking about the start of the football season. I'm talking about the upcoming 3-game series between the Philadelphia Phillies and New York Mets and the 3-game series between the Arizona Diamondbacks and Los Angeles Dodgers.

Recently, I looked through the schedules to see how many teams controlled their own destiny. Here's the list of teams that control their own destiny:

Tampa Bay Rays
Boston Red Sox
Chicago White Sox
Minnesota Twins
Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim

New York Mets
Philadelphia Phillies
Chicago Cubs
Milwaukee Brewers
Arizona Diamondbacks
Los Angeles Dodgers

If you're looking for head-to-head matchups between these teams that will greatly affect the playoffs, you'll be disappointed. Other than this weekend's games, the White  Sox and Twins face off September 23-25 and that's it.

But wait, the Rockies could make things interesting. They didn't make the above list, but they only missed it by a 0.5 game. Once we include them, the number of matchups increase greatly. The Rockies face the Dodgers September 12-14, and they face the Diamondbacks September 19-21 and 26-28. Let's hope the Rockies climb their way back into this race and give us more interesting matchups down to the wire.

In the meantime, I'm going to put off football season for one more week and have my eyes glued to the matchups in the NL East and West this weekend.