Though common sense tells you that it benefits a team to get a playoff bye, you won’t have to look far to find lingering sentiment that extended time off can also cause a team to lose its momentum.
The Milwaukee Brewers, for the first time in the relatively new Major League Baseball playoff format, will have a bye and skip past the wild-card round of the postseason, straight into the National League Division Series.
Before 2022, even the best teams in baseball played postseason baseball quickly after the end of the regular season, with no real bye built into the format.
Now, the top two teams in each league will have a full five days off, playing their regular-season finale Sunday, Sept. 28 and not stepping into the batter’s box again until Saturday, Oct. 4.
Is it better to get that rest or be the team that “gets hot” late in the season and rides that wave all the way through the wild-card round?
Unfortunately, we only have three years of data to work with. Here’s what we do know:
2024: Three of the four teams with byes advanced
Last season, the top seed in the American League and National League both reached the World Series, and the team with the most wins in baseball — the Los Angeles Dodgers — won the World Series. All was just in the world.
Along with Cleveland, three of the four teams that got wild-card-round byes advanced, though the Guardians and Dodgers both needed the full five games to do it. The New York Mets, the No. 6 seed in the National League (who, of course, beat the Brewers in the wild-card round), advanced past No. 2 seed Philadelphia in their series, 3-1.
2023: Three of the four teams with byes … did not advance
The year before was a completely different story.
Only Houston, the No. 2 seed in the American League, advanced out of the divisional round, with upsets the rest of the way — and more than that, none of those series went the full five games. And then the Astros didn’t make the World Series, either.
American League top seed Baltimore didn’t win a playoff game, falling to eventual World Series champion Texas, the No. 5 seed. National League top seed Atlanta, a squad that won 104 games, lost to the No. 4-seeded Phillies, 3-1. And the No. 2-seeded Dodgers, another 100-win team, lost to No. 6 seed Arizona, 3-0.
Arizona and Texas — again, both wild-card round teams — advanced to the World Series, while three 100-plus win teams combined to win a grand total of one playoff game, and all four byes were eliminated before the Fall Classic.
2022: Two bye teams advanced, two didn’t
Our third and only other year of data falls right in between the past two seasons.
The top seed in the American League, the Houston Astros (106-56), wound up winning the World Series. They didn’t lose a game in sweeping No. 5 seed Seattle in the divisional round and the No. 2 seed New York Yankees in the ALCS, then defeated No. 6 Philadelphia in the World Series, 4-2.
The Yankees needed a full five games but were able to hold serve and defeat the third-seeded Guardians in the ALDS. So, both teams with byes advanced in the American League. But both of the NL’s top teams were eliminated in four games at the division-series level.
No. 5 San Diego beat a crazy-good Dodgers team (111-51), 3-1. No. 6 Philadelphia likewise eliminated Atlanta (101-61), 3-1. It proved to be a horrendous year for elite NL teams, with a 101-61 Mets team relegated to the wild-card round, where it lost to the Padres.
In sum, 50% of the teams in the current format to have a bye advanced to the championship series. It’s certainly emblematic, in a small sample, of the idea that any team can win a baseball playoff series, particularly when nothing but top teams are involved.
What about MLB teams that clinch playoff spots early?
Bleacher Report posted a story in 2018 that looked at “early clinchers” — teams that locked up a playoff spot early in September — and found that half of them dropped out early, and the other half performed well in the playoffs, with a couple of champions over the 10-year window it examined.
It’s almost as if records and early clinches don’t matter at all in October.
As a related aside, teams that came through the single-game Wild Card format (2012-2021) didn’t have a great track record of staying hot all the way to the World Series, with only two of a possible 18 teams making it that far. But the two that did — the 2019 Washington Nationals and 2014 San Francisco Giants — won the whole thing.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: How do teams like the Brewers that get a first-round bye fare in the MLB playoffs?
Reporting by JR Radcliffe, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
