Rest or rust? Braves, Phils weigh in after Game 1

ATLANTA -- The well-traveled Phillies and the well-rested Braves met on a sunny Tuesday afternoon at Truist Park, and they provided the first answers to a question that will require much more than just one game, or one October.

In MLB’s new postseason format, is there a downside to a first-round bye?

“I figured that question was going to be coming up,” said Braves slugger Matt Olson, flashing a short-lived grin after his team’s 7-6 loss to the Phillies in Game 1 of the National League Division Series. “It’s a fair question.”

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In other words, did Max Fried’s early innings unravel because he was feeling the effects of a recent sickness, or was it because he was pitching for the first time in 11 days? Did the fact it had been a week since Braves hitters played a game that mattered contribute to leaving seven runners on the bases in the first four innings alone?

And conversely, did the Phillies string together all of those productive at-bats on the way to a six-run lead because they were riding the momentum of their late push to the final NL playoff berth, followed by a weekend sweep of the Cardinals in the NL Wild Card Series?

All fair questions. But no one knows the answer to this rest vs. rust challenge just yet.

“We know we have to come in here ready to play, no matter if they had days off or if they didn't, or if we had days off or we didn't,” Phillies outfielder Bryce Harper said. “We just have to have that mindset every day that we walk in and understand that we're here to win games. We don't want to get behind. We want to stay ahead.”

Gone are the winner-take-all Wild Card Games, replaced by a best-of-three Wild Card Series. Because of those extra days, managers like the Braves’ Brian Snitker, whose club earned the NL’s No. 2 seed and a free pass to the second round, must fill the five-day break between the end of the regular season and Game 1 of the NLDS.

“For how we got there, we needed a couple of days off," Snitker said coming into this series, referring to a sprint to the finish to secure the NL East crown over the Mets in Game 161. "We rode the bullpen guys extremely hard.”

On the other hand, Snitker said. “It's a curse in some ways, too. I don't think we needed five days off.”

This is a challenge, of course, that any manager would gladly accept. Besides avoiding the peril of a short series -- see: the No. 4-seeded Mets, who won 101 regular-season games and were promptly bounced by the fifth-seeded Padres in the NLWCS -- the top two seeds in each league get time to rest, heal and line up pitching. That’s even more vital in the Division Series. In the history of best-of-five MLB postseason series, the winner of Game 1 has gone on to win the series 71% of the time.

On the other hand, history says the extra rest does carry some peril of its own. The Score’s Travis Sawchik dug into the numbers before Phillies-Braves kicked off a quadrupleheader of Game 1s on Tuesday, examining all of the times during the Divisional Era (since 1995) that teams went into a series with four or more days of rest. That research uncovered 88 such series overall, but many involved two teams that were equally well-rested, so those were ferreted out. That left 40 series over the years in which one team had four-plus days of rest, while the other did not.

The results confirmed the hunch. From Sawchik’s analysis:

"In the 40 series, the teams with at least four days of rest went 19-21 in Game 1's, and they only won 17 of the 40 series. Of the 23 series where the more rested team lost, 13 of those teams lost to an opponent with a worse regular-season record."

In this Game 1, there were other factors. Fried was pitching for the first time since Sept. 30, when a stomach bug cut his final outing of the regular season short. Whether that impacted Tuesday’s start or not, Fried encountered a Phillies lineup that picked up right where it left off against the Cardinals. After Fried got the first two outs on three pitches, Philly rattled off four consecutive singles for a 2-0 lead. The Phils strung together enough hits to score in four of the first five innings without hitting a homer, and they built a 7-1 lead after the top of the fifth.

“I’m not going to make any excuses,” said Fried, who had a 2.96 ERA as a starter when pitching on six or more days' rest prior to Tuesday. “I took the ball today and put us in a big hole right away. Right off the bat. They came out swinging and had a really good approach, and frankly, I just didn’t do my job.”

The rest of the Braves looked rusty in the early innings, at least to those who believe the long layoff is a factor.

Fried’s error leading off the third inning put J.T. Realmuto on base (he later scored) and was the first of a series of off-target throws in that inning by Braves defenders. Atlanta had the bases loaded with one out in the first inning before William Contreras bounced into a double play. Dansby Swanson, who’d struck out four times in only four games (including regular-season and postseason) since he broke into the big leagues in 2016, had four strikeouts by the sixth before delivering a critical single ahead of Olson’s three-run home run in the eventful bottom of the ninth.

“I don’t feel like it was a big thing, but we typically don’t get that kind of break during the season,” Olson said. “I felt like everybody was prepared. We did some good workouts. We stayed ready. I didn’t feel like it was a big issue.”

“I don't blame it on that, no,” Snitker said.

It was a different kind of day for the Phillies, who have been living out of suitcases and playing for their baseball lives for more than two weeks. They haven’t been in Philadelphia since the Braves were in Philly. That was Sept. 25, the day the teams finished a four-game series and the Phils departed for a season-ending 10-game road trip to Washington, D.C., Chicago and Houston before charging on to St. Louis for the Wild Card Series.

For most of Tuesday, they looked like a team humming along.

“They were up [six], and they still bunted the guy over and got a sac fly for that [seventh] run,” Braves catcher Travis d’Arnaud said. “It's pretty cool to see. And every run counts, especially now.”

It may take a couple of postseason cycles to figure this out. For whatever it’s worth, as the Phillies celebrated and the Braves regrouped on Tuesday evening, the Mariners were jumping out to an early lead (4-0 by the end of the second inning) against Justin Verlander and the well-rested Astros in Houston. Of course, the Astros then walked off the Mariners, after trailing 7-3 after seven innings, but it remains true that they fell into a hole early.

“I think everyone knew what was at stake and we were getting ready for this game,” Swanson said. “They just outplayed us.”