Including Tuesday night’s game, the Toronto Blue Jays are six games away from the end of the season. Those six games will decide the postseason fate of four teams. Talk about your dramatic finishes!

The Jays, if they haven’t already, should resign themselves to being contestants in a one-game, winner-take-all wild-card death match. The Boston Red Sox — playing red-hot baseball at the moment — imploding to a degree that would allow the Jays to usurp first place in the American League East is highly improbable.

Assuming the Jays don’t implode, we should expect them to duke things out with one of the four other leading wild-card contenders come early October. Which contender, exactly, is the million-dollar question.

There are four teams with a real chance at a wild-card spot: The Orioles, who currently hold the second wild card with 85 wins, just one back of the Jays’ 86; the Detroit Tigers and Seattle Mariners, both with 83; and the young and potent Astros, with 82.

Since the Yankees and Royals are real long shots and the Jays are our assumed victors, let’s focus on the four I mentioned earlier, starting with Baltimore.

The Jays will get a last look at Baltimore in the three-game series that begins tonight. So far this year, the Jays are 9-7 against the Orioles.

Simply put, the Orioles are streaky. They have been all year. They’ve got a very potent offence, but so do a lot of other teams, like the first-place Red Sox. The difference is the Orioles, who’ve hit more homers than any other team in baseball this season and have the most productive long-ball hitter in the game in Mark Trumbo, live and die on offensive prowess.

Their starting pitching has been very hit or miss. Chris Tillman and Dylan Bundy have been solid, but the rest of the Baltimore rotation has been all over the spectrum. According to ESPN, the Orioles have five starters who have made 10 or more starts and recorded an ERA above 5.00. If the Orioles make the playoff this season, it will be the first time since baseball started recording earned runs that any team has made the playoff with five starters sporting ERAs that high.

If the Orioles make it to a wild-card game against the Jays, Toronto will need to worry about shutting down an offence that rivals their own. The Orioles will most likely set up their rotation with one of their more stable starters, like Tillman or Bundy. Assuming the Jays counter with Aaron Sanchez — their rumoured choice for a wild-card match — and assuming he’s on that night, he and the Jays should do fine. Sanchez is 3-0 against the Orioles, with 18 strikeouts in 24 innings pitched this season.

If the Orioles stumble, mainly because the Jay’s beat them up this series, the next probable matchup would be the Tigers.

The Tigers are a more well-rounded club than the Orioles, but, like all teams that find themselves scraping for a wild-card spot, they have one glaring shortcoming: their poor outfield defence, which now sits at -49 defensive runs saved.

Beyond that, the Tigers can hit, pitch, and have a serviceable bullpen. They’ve also enjoyed the fruits of a surging Justin Upton — Melvin Upton Jr.’s brother — showcasing a 1.153 OPS since mid-August, good for best OPS in the AL over that span. Overall, they have the third-best team batting average of any club in baseball at .266, and the sixth-best slugging at .434. Their pitching, however, is middle of the pack.

All in all, not a bad club — but still a club that has played the AL Central champions, the Cleveland Indians, 16 times this season and won just twice. That’s a .133 winning percentage. Oh, and the Tigers have the Indians three more times this week. Unless the Tigers figure out a way to beat the bane of their 2016 season, chances of them pushing into a match against the Jays in wild-card game are nil.

If, however, the Tigers pull it off, Sanchez is still a strong choice to start the wild-card game as he’s pitched well against Detroit this season. He hasn’t registered a win or loss in two games against them, but he has worked a 2.66 ERA and struck out 16 over 13 innings.

While the Astros may not have the best odds at present, they do have the best schedule for making a quick rise to the top of the ranks. The Astros have the Angels and the Mariners before the season is out. That’s three games against a direct wild-card rival, the Mariners, and three games against a division flunky, the last-place Angels.

The bad news for the Astros is the Angels just took two of three from them this past weekend. Even so, no other team in this wild-card race has as soft a schedule as the Astros.

The Astros are a bit like the Tigers in that there is one team that absolutely owns them this year: the Texas Rangers. The Astros have lost 15 games to the Rangers this season. Just cutting that number by a third would change the entire landscape of this postseason race, propelling the Astros to the front of the wild-card race.

Overall, the Jays are 5-2 against the Astros this season, with Sanchez accounting for one of those wins. He pitched seven innings in his only start against Houston, scattering eight hits and two runs while striking out six.

Finally, there are the Mariners. This is the match up I’d like to see most, if only because it would be a wild-card game Canadian baseball fans could truly get into: the Blue Jays, the country’s only baseball team, versus the Mariners, Canada’s adopted, stateside squad.

It’s worth noting the circumstance by which the Mariners find themselves at this make-or-break point. Seattle GM Jerry Dipoto could have gutted a lot of the young talent in the system and went all-in this year, shipping out prospects for impact names when the Mariners got hot around the trade deadline. Instead, he held fast and now he’s enjoying the payout of some of his younger pitchers, like Taijuan Walker and James Paxton. The fact that young players are starting to come into their own should give Seattle fans hope for a strong showing next season, no matter how this year shakes out.

Aside from the pitching and youth, the Mariners have also done a much better job of getting runners on base before letting the likes of Nelson Cruz and Robinson Cano go big fly. They also have a weapon in all-star third baseman Kyle Seager, with his .865 OPS, 29 home runs and career-high batting average.

Unfortunately for the Mariners, the Jays shut down Seager and Cruz in their last matchup, and exploited Seattle’s weakness for giving up home runs. The Mariners are on pace to supply the rest of baseball with 216 homers this year. The Jays also roughed up one of the Mariners best pitchers in Hisashi Iwakuma in their last meeting. Finally, Sanchez held Seattle to one run and four hits over six innings in his lone start against them.

No matter who matches up against the Jays in the wild-card game, the Jays are the better team. But which team is better is largely irrelevant in single-game eliminations. Weaker teams beating stronger teams thanks to the chaotic, chance-driven nature of baseball is what makes baseball the sport it is. The Jays should win a wild-card matchup. But then again, they should have won their division.