The thing about last place is that it stinks. The fourth-place team stunk so hard that they finished in fourth place … and the last-place team stunk even worse than that. It’s the kind of stink that can’t be blown away with a little rest and a couple of transactions, so when spring training rolls around, the odds are good that the last-place team will stink again.



Except that every year, there’s a team that stops stinking. Since the second wild card was introduced in 2012, a team has gone from last place to the playoffs in every season but one. (And in 2015, two last-place teams made the postseason, so the average holds up.)



The list of last-place-to-postseason teams in the two-wild-card era:



2012 Orioles



2013 Red Sox



2015 Rangers



2015 Cubs



2016 Red Sox



2017 Twins



2018 A’s



The Red Sox probably deserve asterisks because in both last-place seasons, they showed the...