Since Major League Baseball’s postseason expanded to twelve teams in 2022, teams who received byes through the opening round are 3–4 when it comes to winning the Division Series. If the Phillies beat the Braves tonight or Saturday, that number will become 3–5. Of the three that did advance so far, one won the World Series, one lost to the team that won the World Series, and one is still playing this year. It’s a small sample that has produced nearly exactly the results you would expect, those being a 4–4 or 5–3 record by favorites. But the iconic Dodgers were among the losers twice, and the iconic Braves might be among the losers twice, and the Dodgers and Orioles were both swept this year, not just beaten, and those sweeps came on the heels of other upsets in the Wild Card Series, making the losses loud. The question is being asked—often facetiously, often dramatically, sometimes in bad faith, sometimes with a kernel of seriousness: Is MLB forcing favorites to wait too long to play?
Back when the playoffs were only eight teams big, all playoff participants would get only one or two days off before their games began. When the playoffs expanded to ten teams in 2012, this number expanded to two or three days for the six division winners. Last year and this year, with the expansion to twelve, the number is now five days for the top two seeds in each league. Five days to rest, five days to line up pitching, five days to sit and think about the upcoming opponent (who will themselves be playing two or three games during those five days, and winning two of them).
After Game 1, Dan Szymborski and Ben Clemens examined this rest question over at FanGraphs, checking the limited historical sample and finding teams with four or more days of postseason rest are 24–11 when facing teams with two or fewer days off before the game. The results come over a variety of eras—some from before 2012, some from the ten-team playoff format, some from these recent days of twelve playoff teams—and a decent proportion include games deeper in the postseason, where one team clinched a Division Series or League Championship Series early and their next opponent took longer to wrap things up. Across all 35 of these games, though, the theme is consistent: There is no evidence to suggest that rest hurts. What’s happened these last two years? The 2023 Orioles overperformed their fundamental statistics in the regular season and were nearly a betting–market underdog against the Rangers despite enjoying home-field advantage. The 2023 Dodgers were forced to use an injured, aging starting pitcher in Game 1. The 2022 Braves chose to use an injured Spencer Strider in Game 3. All four (or five) losers ran into a good team, and they lost to a good team, because these are the playoffs and that is what happens in the playoffs. Good teams play good teams, and half the good teams in any given series lose.
That all said, it’s possible that in some way, rest could play a role.
Let’s consider, for a minute, college football. Specifically, let’s consider the Alabama teams of the last fifteen years, teams who’ve often struggled in the Iron Bowl before dominating in the Playoff or the National Championship. Those teams used rest well, taking advantage of the month without games to finetune things and get healthy and enter their next game with a head full of steam. Let’s also consider the Notre Dame teams of the last fifteen years, teams who’ve performed well in the regular season only to lose reliably soundly in their few opportunities on the national championship or national semifinal stage. Those teams might not have used rest poorly, but they’ve played worse in their encounters with national championship-caliber competition coming off a month of rest, as opposed to when they’ve run into Georgia or Ohio State or Clemson in the week-to-week rhythm of a season. The point? Rest can be an asset. You can probably also turn it into a liability. It is a new challenge for these great regular season teams to encounter, but in the sport known for optimizing everything, you can expect gains to be made in the process as this format gets older.
More seriously, the problem isn’t rest. The problem is pitching. We got at this with Kershaw and Strider, but the biggest problem for the Dodgers this year and the Braves last year isn’t that their bats failed, loud though that may have been. The problem is that they ran into great pitching—Zack Wheeler, Aaron Nola, Zac Gallen, Merrill Kelly—and found themselves unable to counter with great pitching of their own. The best pitchers matter more in baseball’s postseason than they do in the regular season, because with so many fewer games per week in October and so much less an incentive to preserve health, the best pitchers pitch a higher percentage of innings than they do from April through September. This is far from enough to make the Diamondbacks or Phillies favored over the Dodgers or Braves, but it’s enough to make it closer than it otherwise would be, and the story of so many of these games in question—this goes for Orioles vs. Rangers as well—has been that the underdog’s pitching has showed up while the favorite’s hasn’t.
The messages, then? It takes pitching to win in October, as we’ve always known. Also, good teams should probably look into what the Astros have done these last two years to manage their own layoff, just in case.
I don’t say all this as a wholehearted endorsement of the MLB postseason format. I understand the qualm that letting so many teams into the field could devalue the regular season. What’s preceded this paragraph has mostly been said to help dispel a stupid narrative catching hold and to explain that teams should pay even more for aces in free agency. You can never have enough. That said, I wholeheartedly endorse this playoff format. I love it. I think it’s the perfect balance.
Among the other Big Four leagues, one has a great postseason setup, one has a terrible one, and one has a postseason on meth. The NFL’s? Perfect. Teams all really want to make the playoffs, and a great team usually wins the Super Bowl. The NBA’s? Awful. Teams are at the point of actively tanking to avoid playoff berths, and the first round is a formality. It gets better over time, but the regular season is nearing true exhibition status. The NHL’s? Wild. Playoff hockey is a trip, and the NHL has so much parity and a culture that values competition so highly that there is no concern about great teams coasting into April like there is in the NBA. The downside of this is that great teams are often eliminated by mediocre teams, so the champion doesn’t always feel like the best in the sport.
What you want from your league’s format is something which makes every game matter, something which discourages tanking, and something which leaves fans with a satisfying champion. The twelve-team format is nailing both of those first two tenets. This season saw a trade deadline in which only about a third of the league was purely selling, and even among those sellers, multiple teams—the Pirates, the Nationals, Cole Ragans—put together exciting runs of August and September baseball which engaged fans and set the stage for spring training giddiness. Entering the regular season’s final week, more than half the league was in playoff contention, and by virtue of their aces or their stars each would have entered October with a believable path to raising a certain piece of metal. This has been a great baseball season, and the playoff format has helped it in that regard. Under the old eight-team format, the Blue Jays, Diamondbacks, and Marlins all would have been questionable deadline buyers at best.
So far, the twelve-team format has nailed that last tenet as well—producing a satisfying champion. We might not like the Astros, we being the broader baseball fandom, but they were one of the best teams last year. They and the Rangers were both among the best teams this year as well. Of the remaining teams, only the Diamondbacks would be a weird postseason champion, and they are so young and so unheralded and so full of speed and power that an Arizona title would—at least in my opinion—constitute a deserving Cinderella run rather than lucking into a championship after six mediocre months. Baseball’s postseason is doing its job. But I do think one thing is being overlooked with how it’s doing that job, and it brings us back to pitching.
There are two kinds of baseball. There is baseball where teams are trying to maximize wins over a large sample of games, and there is baseball where teams are trying to maximize their win probability in a single given game. Teams that are good at the first are usually good at the second, and the reverse is true as well. But. Certain teams excel in one of those settings more than they excel in the other. Usually, these are teams with a few remarkably good pitchers. It doesn’t push the seesaw overwhelmingly in one direction, but the more teams build themselves around pitching, the better their situation in October. To some extent, this is true of stars in the lineup as well, since position players too need fewer games off in the playoffs than they do in the regular season—especially catchers.
This is a great, great thing for a sport. Not only does the playoff format incentivize teams to go for it in the regular season, not only does the playoff format make for a thrilling pennant race, not only does the playoff format set us up to enter November with a worthy champion parading the trophy through their streets, but the playoff format pushes front offices to build their rosters full of stars, and to not stop at just a handful. So much complaining has been done about baseball’s inability to market its best players, yet here we are in October: Justin Verlander and Bryce Harper and Corbin Carroll and Corey Seager are leading their teams to victory, thanks in part to a postseason format that gives them the rest they need to be involved in more plays than they can proportionally impact over the course of a regular season. MLB’s postseason format isn’t just ok. It’s great. And if the Braves and Dodgers really can’t figure out how to win after a five-day layoff, maybe they weren’t actually the best teams in the league in that given year.
How This Makes Me Feel About the Cubs
A question I’ve asked myself is whether seeing the Diamondbacks celebrate makes the Cubs missing the playoffs feel worse. Personally? It makes it a little better. The Diamondbacks who swept the Dodgers this week looked a lot like the Diamondbacks who beat the shit out of the Cubs in September. The Cubs ran into what Mike Hazen and Torey Lovullo have shaped into a very good baseball team, top to bottom. At the same time, I personally had a hard time putting hope into the Cubs’ slim World Series probability even when it was at its highest. It didn’t feel real. I understand the viewpoint of any fan who does feel more of a sting seeing Ketel Marte celebrate in the swimming pool, but I wasn’t there myself with regards to my level of hope. More than anything, it makes me want the team to get to this stage again soon, because even with so many sweeps, it’s been a heck of a postseason so far.
Tonight’s West Virginia Game
We aren’t yet at the point of seeing a game in Morgantown with national implications again. We aren’t yet at the point of seeing Milan Puskar Stadium up for grabs under the yellow floodlights. That is only because tonight’s WVU game is at Houston.
West Virginia is not a top-25 team in quality right now. They probably won’t be before the season is up. They’ll probably lose one of the next two games and fade back into that tight pack in the Big 12 where most of the objective is avoiding missing a bowl. But for right now, West Virginia is one of two Big 12 programs undefeated in conference play, and with Texas not on the schedule, that makes them the most realistic team to shake up what’s currently aimed at a Red River rematch in Arlington the weekend after Thanksgiving. TCU reminded us of an important thing last year when it comes to college football. Sometimes you don’t have to be good enough to be good enough.
The Early Days of Connor Bedard
I will not lie. I have watched only a clip or two of the Blackhawks’ first two games. It’s been a fun two nights, though, of at least having an awareness of the Hawks as (primarily) a Chicago sports fan. The Hawks are in this charming place where there is no expectation whatsoever on their performance this year, so when they beat the Penguins, it’s a riot, and when they lose to the Bruins, Connor Bedard’s first career goal is the main story anyway.
One of the clips I did see? Brad Marchand giving Bedard the business. That has to feel so cool for Bedard. You’re eighteen years old and one of the icons of your sport is so impressed by you that he’s singling you out for psychological targeting. I’m sure Marchand does this to a lot of rookies, but I’d hope it feels the same way for them as well. It’s one of those little things that can make you really happy for a guy who was very recently a talented kid working obscenely hard to achieve this dream.
Miscellany
Quick things I’d like to comment more about where I haven’t found the time:
- The Packers look bad! Jordan Love looks bad! This will probably be fine, but it hasn’t been a shining week. I think one layer of comfort here is how Mike McDaniel has gone from looking like a genius to overmatched to a genius again a couple times already in his career. In some ways, Matt LaFleur’s just starting to be the full head coach in Green Bay, with Aaron Rodgers out of the room. Ultimately, you hope for similar things there to what you’re hoping to see from the quarterback: You hope he’s learning. Good time for the bye. The NFC is thin enough that the playoffs still feel like a possible goal.
- Jack Trice Legacy Night was everything Iowa State could have made it, and I think the school and the football team should take a lot of pride in that. I hope they turn it into an annual event. I don’t think it would lose its luster, and if I’m allowed to get a little rosy-eyed, we could all use more feel-good in the Civil Rights discourse. Reset; take the pissy political competition out of it; remind people what they really want their society to be.
- I don’t know how to feel about the upcoming Bulls season but I think the answer might be “dreadful.” Honestly, that’s probably a good place to start building this blog’s NBA credibility. No one would rationally choose to start paying extreme attention to the Bulls right now. It’s the right time for us to make that leap.
