Three days to go, two big races to follow

April 11, 2022. Approaching 8 a.m. What were you doing?

I can tell you what Breakfast was doing (besides eating his breakfast). He was sitting around waiting to pick up Spencer Strider from the waiver wire.

And he got him at 8:01 a.m. 

Man, did a lot of us miss out.

Strider's 16 strikeouts over 8 scoreless innings improved his ERA to 2.67 over 17 starts. He has 184 strikeouts to 38 walks. At 9-4, he is easily a top flight candidate for Rookie of the Year in the National League.

Who predicted that? Anyone?

Sam will certainly take it as he continues to lead the JLB in ERA at 3.04, and the performance now put him up 10-8-6 over the Crox.

Main Line is up 13-5-6 against Big League Choo, so if the season ended today, the Gamblers would miss out on the playoffs by 1 game.

A similar gap is in the NL as the Cheese is up 14-5-5 over the Dude in their head-to-head season finale. The Dude has a 10-game lead, which is not in jeopardy being that the live standings have him up just 1 game as the scores stand right now. JV just needs to pick up 1 more win there to tie the Dude in the standings, but the first tie-breaker is overall wins and JV would have that easily (the Dude currently has 14 more ties helping push him into that first place position).

It's not a complete runaway on the batting side of things for the Dude, so a big weekend — or at least a better weekend than JV on offense — should secure the bye and avoid the battle against the No. 3 seed.

The two AL matchups of importance have more categories that could go either way.

Sunday night baseball features Padres-Dodgers, so with Choo, the Dude and JV all having key bats on those rosters, we could be in for some last-minute excitement in the JLB.