Do first-round byes disrupt hard-earned momentum? Not so fast

Congrats to the Dodgers, Guardians, Phillies and Yankees, who performed well enough for six months this season to earn a first-round bye past the Wild Card round. That gave them time to rest and reset their rotations – all while entirely avoiding the risk that their seasons might come to a quick end in the first round’s best-of-three series, as happened to the 99-win Rays last fall.

At the same time, though: Won’t you spare a thought for the poor, doomed Dodgers, Guardians, Phillies and Yankees? The layoff they'll face while waiting for the Division Series will cost them all their momentum and ruin the timing of their hitters, since they’ll be forced to sit idle while the Wild Card teams get to keep their skills sharp in must-win games.

After all, last year, three of the four teams that got the bye then lost in the Division Series. Therefore, the bye is bad. Right?

Not exactly. Perhaps not at all.

It’s not hard to see why the bye is viewed as being a detriment, of course. In the first two years of this playoff system, look at what’s happened.

In 2023, the bye teams lost three of the four Division Series matchups.

• BAL lost to TEX
• ATL lost to PHI
• LAD lost to AZ
• … but not HOU, which beat MIN

In 2022, it was a 50-50 split: the bye team lost two of four matchups.

• ATL lost to PHI
• LAD lost to SD
• … but not HOU, which beat SEA
• … but not NYY, which beat CLE

That’s a mere 3-5 record for the rested teams, and it’s particularly understandable why Braves fans might feel like the bye isn't the advantage they'd like it to be; they have, after all, lost to a Wild Card team in their own division, the rival Phillies, after a bye in two consecutive Octobers.

On the other hand, the sport is wildly different in a short October series; when the Braves' hitters struggled against Philadelphia pitching last year, they had to deal with the top Philadelphia quartet of Aaron Nola, Zack Wheeler, Ranger Suárez and José Alvarado throwing 66% of the innings in the NLDS – after throwing only 38% of Philadelphia’s regular-season innings. If hitters don't hit in the playoffs, look to their opposition, not their calendar.

Plus, the rested Astros not only won both their Division Series, they won six out of seven games while doing so. In 2022, they had breaks of five, three and four days between their various postseason series on their way to a title, and the 2013 and '18 champion Red Sox had gaps of at least three days before every round – so maybe there’s not quite as much of a trend here as you might like.

Really, we’re trying to answer four questions here.

1) Is there enough evidence to say there’s any kind of impact?

No.

It’s eight head-to-head best-of-five matchups between teams all good enough to get to the playoffs, making most of them something like 54/46 propositions. It's 30 total Division Series games across those eight series. One recent study suggested that a single head-to-head baseball series would need to be best-of-75 (!) to simply match the “best team advances” rate of the NBA playoffs.

Baseball, in small samples, can be unpredictable, and a best-of-three or a best-of-five format just isn't enough to tell you which team is better – look no further than this year's White Sox, with 120 losses at the time, completing a three-game sweep in the season's final week.

So: No. That was easy.

2) How many teams that got the bye had their season end in the first round?

Not one, ever.

Teams who got the bye in the first round have a perfect 100% “did you advance to the second round” rate. It’s the only fully predictable thing in baseball. We're being extremely tongue-in-cheek here, but it's important. If you're just looking at "did the rested team lose in the Division Series," you can't ignore that absolutely none of them lost in the Wild Card Series, too.

3) Were the upsets … actually upsets?

This part is the tricky one, because “more wins and a higher seed” should tell you that one team is better than the other – except those accolades were collected over six months. We’re talking about maybe four days here.

Remember back in 2022, when the Phillies (87 wins) and Padres (89) made for a surprising NLCS. At the time, we looked into their rosters and how much they’d changed, because between them, they’d added stars like Josh Hader and Juan Soto, while bidding farewell to unproductive veterans like Didi Gregorius and Eric Hosmer. Regular-season win totals don’t tell you a ton about the rosters that are available in October.

So, then, let’s review the three series where a team that had to fight through the Wild Card round won over a rested team in 2023, to see what those matchups actually looked like at the time.

• Arizona (84 wins) over Los Angeles (100 wins)

Was it an upset? OK, yes. It’s hard to argue otherwise when a 100-win team loses to an 84-win team, especially when the Dodgers took eight of 13 head-to-head meetings. Looking back, we were already talking about how the Dodgers were incredibly vulnerable in the rotation – in addition to having to start journeyman Lance Lynn and rookie Bobby Miller, they had to use a clearly diminished Clayton Kershaw, who had posted a 5.40 FIP after his return from injury and ended up having shoulder surgery – but we’re not naive here. Upset.

• Philadelphia (90 wins) over Atlanta (104 wins)

Was it an upset? Not really. Braves fans will say yes, but the seasonal win totals were plenty misleading here, given how much had changed on both sides. The Phillies returned Bryce Harper from injury and considerably improved their defense to play at a 100-win pace for the final four months of the year; the Braves, beset by late injuries to Charlie Morton, Max Fried, and Kyle Wright, as well as Bryce Elder’s second-half slide, had a 5.61 ERA in September.

When 11 MLB.com writers made playoff predictions, six chose the Phillies in this matchup. When we did a deeper breakdown between the two sides, we finished the evaluation with “we have enough concerns about Atlanta’s pitching and we like what the Phillies have done on the mound enough that we think they’re going to squeak this one out. The best team in the regular season isn’t always the one that wins a short season in October.” Exactly. Not an upset.

• Texas (90 wins) over Baltimore (101 wins)

Was it an upset? Maybe, but maybe not. For all the talk about the bats going cold due to a layoff, it’s worth remembering that Baltimore pitching allowed 21 runs and 18 walks in just 26 innings, and the Rangers did have a far superior regular-season run differential than the Orioles did. A big part of Baltimore’s win advantage was its great bullpen fueling it to one-run victories, but it lost closer Félix Bautista to an elbow injury just before the playoffs began. Is it that stunning that a team with six All-Stars and a Hall of Fame-worthy manager could win three games in a row? Not much of an upset.

4) So, how often should the higher seed be favored to win?

This is an interesting philosophical question, because the higher seed should lose sometimes, right?

We want drama, and we want upsets, because otherwise, why bother playing the games? Just advance the higher seeds all the way to the World Series, then. You obviously don’t want a 0% higher-seed-advances rate. You probably don’t want it to be 100%, either.

So let's find out what's actually happened. Going back to 2012, and excluding Wild Card Games, we’ve had exactly 102 different postseason series. Two of those came between two teams who had identical regular-season records, so let’s set those aside and focus on a nice, round 100 multiple-game postseason series since 2012.

The team with the better regular-season record is all of ... 52-48. Which, for the record, is exactly what the home-team advantage has been in the regular season this year: 52-48. So, in at least one sense, it's working as expected.

Sometimes, that’s 6-1, like it was in 2018. Sometimes, it’s 1-6, like it was in 2014, or 3-8, like it was in 2023.

Remember, too, that last year Arizona and Texas made it all the way to the World Series – beating higher-seeded foes in their respective League Championship Series – and their supposedly superior opponents weren’t coming off any more or less rest after the Division Series. Sometimes, teams get hot. Sometimes, baseball just happens.

None of which is to say that the system is perfect and cannot be changed. You might, after all, want to tweak things to give the higher seed an even larger advantage than “rest” and “home field,” or to reseed after the first round, or to try to have a higher seed win more than 52% of the time. Nor is it easy to prove that the layoff doesn’t affect hitters – or at least to prove that it does so more than “facing a postseason’s team’s best pitchers” does.

But imagine a scenario, if you will, where the top two seeds in each league were given the choice between playing in the first round or advancing right to the second – i.e., taking the bye, or avoiding the rust. It’s pretty safe to guess how every single one of them would choose. It wouldn’t be to risk their season ending in the Wild Card round. There's nothing more valuable than a guaranteed series win.