Pennant Racin', Sept. 28

OK, today at 2 p.m. Eastern, I’ll be doing an Ask Me Anything on Substack. You can register here, it’s totally free, and we’ll talk about whatever. Heck, “Today” asked me about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, so it’s all fair game.

On to the baseball!

Four days left in the regular season, and we still have a couple of wild races going on. Let’s check out today’s winners and losers:

Winners

Houston Astros (beat the Mariners 8-3)

Many years ago, when I was still a kid, I spent a summer watching a lot of the soap opera “Days of Our Lives.” This was a time that, to my daughters, would seem like the Paleolithic period. We owned one television. That television had four channels (plus one more UHF that we could get fuzzily on clear days when the rabbit ears antenna worked their magic). My mother watched “Days of Our Lives,” so I watched “Days of Our Lives,” and I got hooked, and even now, once in a while, I think of Roman and Marlena and others, particularly Marlena, because she was portrayed by Deidra Hall, who was also (1970s kids like me will remember) the Electra Woman on the fantastic show, “Electra Woman and Dyna Girl.”

You have to be wondering: Where the heck is this going?

Well, the summer ended, and I went back to school, and at one point, when we were home for some reason, I watched “Days of Our Lives” again … and I had absolutely no idea what was going on. It had been only a few weeks, I suppose, but soap opera storylines change so fast, and while the characters are technically the same, their stories had changed so much that I was lost.

I could imagine that’s how most people felt watching Wednesday’s bizarro exchange between Houston reliever Hector Neris and Seattle icon Julio Rodriguez.