Is a Postseason Bye the Advantage It Was Meant to Be?

[Bailey Hall]

We know the results haven't favored top teams in the first few years of the new playoff format. Is that a phenomenon with staying power?

Image courtesy of © Ron Chenoy-Imagn Images

With the Cubs on the outside looking in at another postseason, we “lovable loser” fans will just have to watch from the sidelines, hoping our enemies lose and our second-favorite teams win. One of the most interesting things to watch for in October are the inevitable upsets: Wild Card teams who beat out the juggernauts from the season. Since 2022, when the playoffs expanded to accommodate three Wild Card teams in each league, the two division winners with the best records receive byes, meaning they don’t play in the Wild Card round and have almost a full week to rest and set their rotation before the Division Series.

Since then, the playoff upsets have seemed to become the norm, with Wild Card entrants meeting each other in the World Series last year and multiple upsets each fall. In theory, the bye week is a reward and a built-in advantage for the top teams, but is it? Is there any correlation between these playoff upsets and the top teams getting such a long layoff? 

Let’s look at the 2022 National League postseason. The Dodgers and the Braves, who were seeded 1 and 2, both lost handily in their first series against the two teams with the worst records in the playoffs: the Padres and the Phillies. The Dodgers, with an outstanding .685 record, lost in a massive upset, three games to one. The Dodgers seem to find themselves in this situation frequently: having an exceptional season record and being incapable of capitalizing on that when October comes. Could that be because of the bye? 

One season later, in 2023, The Dodgers had another incredible season, going 100-62 for a .617 record, but again, in round two of the playoffs, the Diamondbacks, with a record barely above .500, swept them. The Diamondbacks, with a .519 record, swept Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, with much of the series played in Dodger Stadium. Not only did the Diamondbacks make it to the World Series, but their opponent, the Rangers, were also a Wild Card, and they swept the Orioles, who had the second-best record in all of baseball. 

The Wild Card has always been a point of contention for many baseball purists, but having Wild Card teams, to me, doesn’t seem like the biggest cause of playoff upsets. If we look at 2016, the year the Cubs won the World Series, there were two Wild Card teams per league--although, unlike the current format, there was no way for two such teams to get through to the Division Series, The Cubs had the best season record by a mile, and their World Series opponent, the Cleveland Indians (now Guardians), had the third-best record in baseball.

At that time, the Wild Card teams played one game before round one, and no teams had bye weeks. With the old system, it seemed like the better teams made deeper runs, rather than underdogs who went on a streak right as the playoffs began. 

Now, the regular season seems to have no bearing on the outcomes of the playoffs, and it seems that the extra week of rest for the top teams has something to do with it. Maybe it’s that five or six days between games is too much to sustain a sound routine, in a very routine-oriented game, or maybe it's that Wild Card teams can build momentum in that first round that the juggernauts can’t.

There's also a logical argument to be made here. Hot streaks aren't necessarily predictive, but the current format means that we have no information about how the top teams in the league are playing when the Division Series begins. By contrast, and by definition, the teams they face are playing well, in that they just took a series from another playoff-qualifying club. One half of the Division Series matchup has been selected for current quality of play; the other might not have needed to win a game in a fortnight.

Whatever the reason, Cubs fans should watch out this postseason for Wild Card teams, because as we’ve seen in the last two seasons, they seem to be the toughest competition out there. Winning the division should always be the goal, but maybe the team doesn't need to worry about pursuing the bye and establishing home-field advantage in the playoffs as much as they would have under the old format.

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