This story was originally published in 2024 and was updated for 2025.
Now that the first round is out of the way, it’s time for a little narrativeball before the real ball starts. Today’s topic: Do the teams who had to stay sharp and play in the Wild Card round get an advantage over their higher-seeded opponents, who had to suffer a devastating loss of momentum and timing while waiting around with a bye?
The answer has always been: No, of course not. The rested teams suffer a 0% chance of having their season end in the Wild Card round, for one, and get to set their pitching rotation however they like, for another. (You’ll note that the Tigers, who had to use all three of their top starters to get past the Guardians, will have to begin the ALDS with a bullpen game against the Mariners. It’s not ideal.)
Perhaps this, above all else: There’s hardly any such thing as an upset between two teams good enough to get to the playoffs in a best-of-five series. A star like Ronald Acuña Jr. going 2-for-14, as he did in the 2023 NLDS against a Phillies team that had to get past Miami in the Wild Card, is a perfectly normal thing to have happen in a four-game series against excellent pitching. It happens all the time.
But the narrative persisted, anyway, in part because of those 104-win ‘23 Braves falling to a 90-win Phillies team, even though that wasn’t really much of an upset all, given everything that had happened that summer.
So, after three years of this format, what have we learned?
We’ve had 12 Division Series. Six times, the rested team won. Six times, the stayed-warm team won. It’s actually kind of perfect.
In 2024, the bye teams won three of the four series, with the Phillies falling to the Mets the lone exception. The year before, the bye teams lost three of the four series, with only the rested Astros topping the Twins. The first year, 2022, it was a 50/50 split – the rested Astros and Yankees won, while the stayed-warm Braves and Dodgers did not.
Really, we’re trying to answer four questions here.
1) Is there enough evidence to say there’s any kind of negative impact from the bye?
Probably not.
It’s 12 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 48 total Division Series games across those 12 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 in the big picture – as might have been made clear a few weeks ago when the 91-loss Pirates swept the Dodgers in a three-game set.
If there was, then the Blue Jays wouldn’t have started ace Kevin Gausman on the final day of the season with the division title and a bye on the line – knowing that if they’d lost and had to play in the Wild Card, he wouldn’t have been available. They wanted the bye, because …
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.
Seattle's Randy Arozarena put it perfectly, saying “I definitely think winning the division, earning that bye week definitely helps you. It's a lot better than the season ending, and then you just continue to play.”
It is. It is a lot better than the season ending.
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. One way to do it is to go check out the pre-series odds from FanGraphs, which attempts to account for a lot more than just ‘rate the records,’ which is deeply important since the rosters you have in October may not be what you had for much of the year.
Of the 12 series, the team with the bye were given average odds of 60%, which is to say “the bye team was figured to win seven times.” In reality, the bye team won six times, and if that’s not close enough for you, then the answer here is really just “baseball happens.” (The system, perhaps, didn’t fully know how badly damaged Clayton Kershaw’s shoulder was when he took the ball for the 2023 Dodgers, allowing six runs in one-third of an inning.)
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. From 2012-’24, excluding win-or-go-home Wild Card Games, we’ve had exactly 111 different postseason series. Two of those were between two teams who had identical regular-season records, so set those aside, and we’re looking at 109.
The team with the better regular-season record is all of ... 59-52. Which, for the record, is a .531 winning percentage, which is almost exactly what the .543 home-team advantage has been in the regular season. 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, or 7-4, like it was last year.
Remember, too, that in 2023, 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.