I love baseball strategy. With the advent of analytics that’s opened the eyes of many to how baseball can be optimized, new excitement has been brought with the introduction of a new round to the MLB postseason: the Wild Card Series. Now, I know, the 2020 postseason featured a Wild Card Series of eight teams with a traditional NBA-style seeding (1 seed vs. 8 seed, 2 seed vs. 7 seed, etc.), but that round featured many teams that either suffered from COVID IL stints or just didn’t deserve to be in a playoff position in the first place. So, for all intents and purposes, the four games that took place yesterday were the first games of the newly-designed MLB postseason format.
I watched pretty much every inning of every game yesterday for scientific purposes, because I was interested in seeing how the gameplay would change. To move on in this series versus from the Championship Series to the World Series would require half the wins (the Wild Card Series is a best-of-three, while the CS and WS are best-of-seven series), which I anticipated being a point of emphasis on pitching matchups (spoiler alert: I was right). What I also anticipated was low-scoring affairs with lots of substitutions. I didn’t nail that prediction on the head, but my logic was solid. Postseason games are a different animal than regular season games; pitching gets stronger, managers have quicker hooks, and clutch moments are really clutch. But let’s look at each game for a second and see if we can identify any noticeable new changes to game strategy, or at the very least, game sentiment.
We’ll start with the first game on the gauntlet, Rays vs. Guardians, perhaps the most exciting/boring game from yesterday’s contests. Jose homered off Shane (yes, that’s applicable for both teams) and Cleveland won, 2-1. This was always going to be a low-scoring series, as Tampa and Cleveland rank as some of the worst slugging teams in the league. But what piqued my interest the most about this game is that no team really “capitalized” on opportunities, mostly because neither side created many chances for success. The Rays had four people on base the whole game (including Jose Siri’s homer), while the Guardians put eight guys on base (including Jose Ramirez’s homer). The game wasn’t as much about getting ahead as it was about suppressing the other side, which is a backwards way of thinking of winning ballgames, but it worked, and it’s certainly justifiable in a series where the advancing team only needs to win two games. In other words, you can’t really knock the winner of this series for winning without scoring runs because it’s truly the best example of the MLB postseason in a nutshell.
Phillies vs. Cardinals was up next, and boy, was that a crazy ninth inning. Remember how I said that the postseason is all about managerial quick hooks? Well, not only did Cardinals manager Oli Marmol not have anyone warming up in the bullpen amidst Ryan Helsley’s ninth-inning collapse, but Helsley didn’t even disclose to his manager that he was experiencing numbness in his middle finger, which most likely led to his mound inefficiencies, or he did when it was too late. That’s a major blunder for a team that had such a magical season in 2022. Health matters in sports, and when it comes to potentially-penultimate elimination games, everyone has to think about player safety and win probabilities. So, that whole situation was anti-best-of-three strategy on the Cardinals part. The Fightin' Phils, however, chipped their way to six runs in the ninth, fending off 100+mph pitches from Helsley for cheap base hits on weakly-hit balls. I’m not insulting the way the Phillies approached the ninth, even though it sounds like I am. I’m only trying to emphasize how adaptive Philly’s lineup got when the game was on the line. Sure, Helsley lost the plate in a disastrous ninth, but the Phillies were able to live up to one of baseball’s greatest mantras without any of their usual power: they put the ball in play, and good things happened.
I’ll talk about the Mariners vs. Blue Jays and Padres vs. Mets games together because both series would look completely different if the other team had won the initial game. Had Alek Manoah out-dueled Luis Castillo, then Kevin Gausman would not need to pitch in today’s Game Two. The same thing goes for the Mets and Jacob deGrom, who were going to have Chris Bassitt pitch in today’s matchup against Slam Diego, but after an abysmal showing from Max Scherzer last night, all of that changes. Because going from a five or six-man rotation in the regular season to a three-man rotation for the playoffs is widely accepted and makes sense by a personnel standpoint, a manager can plan pitching matchups for the Wild Card Series as if their team is going to move on to the next round. While the original Wild Card Game featured a lite version of this strategy, it’s never fit as perfectly as it has with a best-of-three series. Buck Showalter was ready to have Jacob deGrom pitch in Game One of a hypothetical Mets vs. Dodgers NLDS, but now he’s forced to upend that plan altogether. For every team that lost yesterday, today’s game is win or go home. The Rays and Cardinals, but particularly the Blue Jays and Mets, will have to employ quick-changing strategies as their win probabilities shift throughout today’s games. Perhaps that’s the most illuminating alteration to the gameplay of the Wild Card Series: everything changes in the blink of an eye, way more than for any other playoff series we've previously seen.
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