Clinching
September 27, 2025 at 11:32 AM by Dr. Drang
Although I complained last year of the Sports app’s deficiencies, I’ve been giving it another try. I do like having the score of a favorite team continually updated in the Dynamic Island, but just this morning I learned of another problem.
With the baseball season winding down, I looked in at the wild card standings. Here’s the American League:
The legend (just out of sight below the bottom of the screenshot) says that the little green arrows in the left margin mean “Clinched Playoffs” and the red bars mean “Out of Playoff Contention.” Unlike most sports apps, there’s no designation for clinching the division, an important omission.
Worse than the omission, though, is the outright error. The Mariners have definitely clinched a spot in the playoffs. They’re five games ahead of their nearest rival in the AL West, the Astros, and there are only two games left in the season. How did the Sports app screw this up? I suspect it comes down to the omission mentioned above. The Mariners are in the playoffs because they’ve clinched their division; if Sports doesn’t account for divisional clinching, it may not be able to tell that the Mariners are guaranteed a spot in the playoffs.
(And more than just a spot. Because they’ll have at least the second best record among the AL division winners, the Mariners will get a first-round bye.)
We see the same problem in the National League:
Like the Mariners, the Dodgers are definitely in the playoffs but haven’t been awarded the green arrow. What’s worse about this omission is that the Padres—the team the Dodgers beat out for the NL West—have been marked as a playoff team.
So I’m happy to keep Sports around for its Dynamic Island support, but I still won’t be using it as my main sports app. I’ll continue bouncing between the apps from CBS and ESPN. Neither is great, but they’re both better than Apple’s.
Update 27 Sep 2025 4:16 PM
A few people have suggested that I wasn’t seeing green arrows for the Mariners and Dodgers because I was looking at the Wild Card tabs instead of the Divisional tabs. As it happens, I still have a screenshot of the AL Divisional tab taken at the same time as the two screenshots above. No arrow for the Mariners.
I didn’t take a screenshot of the NL Divisional tab, but I looked at it, and there was no arrow for the Dodgers at the time. Since I took these screenshots, all the tabs have been updated and all the teams that have clinched a playoff spot have arrows. I don’t know what caused the update, but it’s kind of late—the Mariners clinched their division days ago.