There’s always something fascinating going on in the world of baseball -- and there’s always something new. Every Friday morning throughout the season, heading into the weekend, inspired by Zack Lowe’s terrific “10 Things I Like” NBA column for ESPN, we present the Five Fascinations, five fun things going on in the baseball world. Also, we’d like to shout out the always excellent Ben Clemens at FanGraphs, another progenitor of a similar format. Submit your personal fascinations to [email protected], or just yell at me about mine.

1. Hey, are the Orioles OK?
With their 10-inning loss to the Red Sox on Wednesday, the Orioles fell to 5-5 in the month of September. That means, so far anyway, September is the third consecutive month the Orioles -- ostensibly a World Series contender -- haven’t had a winning record. They were 12-13 in July and 13-15 in August. That is not how a World Series contender is supposed to act.

There are a lot of issues with the Orioles right now. Foremost among them is their bullpen and, perhaps surprisingly, their defense, as Neil Paine pointed out in his excellent newsletter. But for all the worries about the Orioles, this is a team that rises and falls because of its stars, which is why they really, really need to get Adley Rutschman going. Baltimore’s downturn has coincided with its franchise pillar struggling mightily at the plate, to the tune of a .552 OPS since July 1. The Orioles finally dropped him out of the No. 2 spot in the lineup this week, and he responded with his first extra-base hit in 12 games, a double on Monday.

The Orioles are considered a deep team, but they’re weirdly top-heavy right now. Gunnar Henderson and Anthony Santander are carrying them, with Rutschman and Jackson Holliday slumping while Jordan Westburg and Ryan Mountcastle are sidelined. Getting those two big bats back before October should help, but all told: The Orioles’ young stars are recessing right when they’re supposed to be surging.

Question about the Orioles’ postseason: How much should we freak out about them if they don’t get out of the Wild Card round? They could still pass the Yankees in the AL East, of course, but if they don’t, they’re likely going to face, like, the Royals in Camden Yards the first week of October with much stress. After last year’s October flameout, another one could put a fanbase that has been awfully patient up to this point on high alert. There are a lot of teams with particular postseason urgency this year. The Orioles are very much one of them.

2. Braves or Mets?
The last NL playoff spot available sure looks like it’s going to come down to the Mets and Braves. Their battle this year isn’t quite as intense as their fight for the NL East title in 2022, when they both won 101 games (though the Braves ended up getting the higher seed in the playoffs), but the stakes may be higher this time: After all, whoever falls short is missing the postseason entirely.

FanGraphs gives them nearly equal odds of making it. So, who has the advantage? Here’s a quick-and-dirty, back-of-napkin argument for each:

Mets: Vibes. Francisco Lindor. Young hitters peaking at the right time. A rotation that’s steady and experienced. An effective bullpen. Seriously, vibes.

Braves: An excellent rotation, even without Reynaldo López (though they’ll obviously miss him). Despite all their injuries, they still have the fearsome tandem of Marcell Ozuna and Matt Olson. A far easier schedule moving forward. A three-game set against the Mets at Truist Park that will also decide who has the tiebreaker (the teams have split 10 games so far this year). A lot more postseason experience than the Mets.

The absence of López might tip it to the Mets for me. But how much fun is that Sept. 24-26 series between these teams going to be?

3. Tigers Fever!
First off, let’s note that the Tigers have a real chance to do something they haven’t done since 2016: Finish the season with a winning record. (They enter Friday three games over .500.) That is not nothing, a key sign of progress for a franchise that has had a difficult time taking substantial steps forward over the past decade. Getting over .500 is a big deal! Tigers fans have been waiting a long time for that.

But why stop there? After all, this is the team with the best record in baseball since Aug. 8, which, it should be noted, is a week after they traded away starter Jack Flaherty. They’re smoking hot and putting some real fear into the Twins, whom they trail by only 3 1/2 games after dropping Thursday’s game against the Rockies. Key to the Tigers’ run has been precisely what they’ve been waiting on for several years: Their young hitters. The return of Kerry Carpenter (27) has sparked a lineup that was already rolling with Riley Greene (24), hitting .297-in-September Colt Keith (23) and, at last, Spencer Torkelson (25), who hit like the All-Star the Tigers have long expected him to become in August. You don’t have to squint hard to see the Tigers as a pretty scary team over the next few years: They’re a pretty scary team now, after all.

A Tigers postseason appearance would be a very fun plot twist, wouldn’t it? Fun fact: The Tigers haven’t won a postseason game since 2013, in a game that featured David Ortiz, Ryan Dempster, Shane Victorino, Torii Hunter, Prince Fielder and the immortal Al Alburquerque. This franchise is plenty due.

4. The latest return of Byron Buxton
We of course have to mention the team that the Tigers are chasing: the Twins. It has been assumed for a few months now that the Twins would find their way into the playoffs, a place that isn’t so scary for them after they finally ended their postseason losing streak last year. But this has been a .500 team since June 30, a stretch that has allowed the Tigers and Red Sox to crawl back into the AL Wild Card chase as the Twins’ offense has sputtered.

But hope is on the way in, once again, Byron Buxton. Buxton will play his first game in a month on Friday, which brings the Twins one step closer to finally having their star triumvirate of Buxton, Royce Lewis and Carlos Correa in the lineup together. (Correa is still recovering from right plantar fasciitis.) Friday will be Buxton’s 91^st game of the season, which will put him one short of tying for the second-highest total of his 10-year career, behind only 2017 (140 games).

All told, that’s pretty healthy for Byron Buxton! The Twins, as always, promise to be much better with him in the lineup. Here is the Twins’ record with Buxton in the starting lineup since his debut season in 2015, compared to their record without him:

With: 379-319 (.543)
Without: 379-425 (.471)

Essentially, the Twins have played like this year’s Royals with Buxton in the lineup, and like this year’s Blue Jays without him. If they lock down that Wild Card spot over the next two weeks, Buxton will be a central reason why. Again.

5. Clase’s Cy Young standing
I’m not sure a closer can have much better of a season than the Guardians’ Emmanuel Clase is having. He has 44 saves and is sure to lead the AL in that category for the third straight year. He hasn’t blown a save since May. He has an 0.67 ERA. Over the past two months, he has given up exactly two earned runs. (He’s only given up five all year.) He’s incredible.

Here’s a fun fact about Clase, though, despite all the success of the last few years: He has never received a Cy Young vote. Not one. Not even a down-ballot vote. Last week, in our monthly MLB.com Cy Young poll, he finished fourth, which would be incredibly high for a reliever: No reliever has made the top five since Kenley Jansen back in 2017. The highest any reliever got last year was the Orioles’ Félix Bautista, who finished 11^th. (Right behind him, amusingly, was the Red Sox’s Chris Martin.)

The last reliever to win a Cy Young was the Dodgers’ Eric Gagne back in 2003. It seems a fair bet that he will be the last to do so. If Clase, who, again, is having essentially a perfect season, can’t finish higher than fourth despite a not-all-that-stacked field, it’s clear that the days of relievers even being considered for the Cy Young Award are long, long over.

Fun Series of the Weekend: Dodgers at Braves
Heading into the season, this sure looked like an NLCS matchup, and hey, that could still happen. But it’s fair to say these two teams look a lot different in mid-September than they did going into the year. Both teams have been ravaged by injuries to key players. And yet here they are, both with plenty at stake, with just two weeks left in the season. There’s no Ronald Acuña Jr. and no Spencer Strider and no Clayton Kershaw and no Tyler Glasnow, which is to say … there are still enough All-Stars on each roster to make your head spin.