Before there were three divisions in each league in baseball, the last great pennant race was between the Braves and Giants for the National League West title in 1993. There was no Wild Card in play yet. The winner of the division would go to the playoffs and the loser would go home. The Giants ended up being the losers, if you can even call them that when discussing a season that ended with a 103-59 record. But the Braves finished at 104-58. They got to keep playing. The Giants, with 103 wins to their name, were the ones who went home.

Now September is different in baseball, even though we have close Wild Card races in both leagues. And we have an old-fashioned, bare-knuckle fight between the Cardinals and the Cubs in the NL Central, where the loser of the division isn’t guaranteed a spot in the NL Wild Card Game with two weeks to go. Just because it is St. Louis and Chicago, it is a beautiful baseball thing, and it makes September baseball feel the way you still want it to feel with two weeks to go in the regular season. Already Cards fans have to be wondering how much of a difference Ryan Braun’s ninth-inning grand slam swing to beat St. Louis on Sunday might make in the end.

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It is that time of year in baseball. It is that kind of race in the Central, especially with the Brewers still hanging around a game behind the Cubs, even having lost Christian Yelich for the season. One swing might mean everything when the regular season ends on Sept. 29, if it does end on the 29th and there isn’t a tiebreaker game. Or two.

But perhaps the most fascinating race of all continues to be the one between the Yankees and the Astros for the best record in the American League. They both entered Monday’s games with records of 98-53. If the season ended today -- which it sure won’t -- Houston would have home-field advantage because it is 4-3 against New York this season. There is a good chance, when you look at the remaining schedules for both teams, that the Yanks and the ’Stros might end up with better records than the Braves and the Giants did in 1993, before three divisions and Wild Cards and all the rest of it.

Of course, there is no guarantee that the Yankees and Astros will end up playing in the AL Championship Series the way they did two years ago, even if we’ve talked all season about what happened in that series, when the home-field advantage was crucial. The Astros won Games 1 and 2 at home; the Yanks did the same in Games 3, 4 and 5 and went back to Houston leading, 3-2. Then the Yankees scored one run in the final two games, the Astros went to the World Series, which they won, and the Yanks went home.

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On Monday morning, I asked Astros manager AJ Hinch if what is going on right now with his team and the Yankees feels like a pennant race out of the past.

As you can see, Mr. Hinch didn’t bite.

“No, not really,” he said. “Important, yes. But not like a pennant race. I think it is important to play to win just as much as a test of your mentality. You never show up not to win, so ‘win today’ has proven to serve us well. We will count up the wins at the end.”

Fans of both teams, though, look at this differently. You know they do. Yankees fans remember all too well what happened in 2017, and they would desperately like to see their team get a Game 7 at home if it is ever the Yanks against the Astros again. A bigger concern, of course, is for New York somehow to make it to Sept. 29 without losing any other key players to injuries, something that has happened on a weekly basis all season long, and sometimes on a daily basis. Last week Edwin Encarnación and Gary Sánchez both suffered injuries.

But at least the Yankees are getting reinforcements as October approaches. Jordan Montgomery, coming back from Tommy John surgery, pitched against the Blue Jays on Sunday. So did Dellin Betances. Giancarlo Stanton is expected to return shortly, after just 38 plate appearances this season, one home run and no game action since June 25.

The Yankees have three against the Angels, three against the Blue Jays, two against the Rays and three against the Rangers. The Astros have two against the Rangers, two against the Mariners and seven against the Angels, who won’t have Mike Trout the rest of the way.

Eleven regular-season games remain for both teams, before they try to win the 11 they would need to win the World Series. The stakes aren’t as high as they are for the Cubs and Cardinals and Brewers and the tightly packed NL Wild Card contenders. They’re still pretty stinking high in New York and Houston because of what happened two years ago. The two teams with the best records in baseball keep fighting, to the finish, for the best record in their league. There are still scoreboards to watch in September, before we count up all the wins in the end.