What we learned in the MLB wild card round: Game 1 is key, aces matter

There was a lot of good baseball this week. Elite pitching performances. One-run contests. Stars getting big hits in big moments.

Thursday night’s Game 3 — New York Mets 4, Milwaukee Brewers 2 — was a true postseason epic. Back-to-back Brewers homers in the seventh inning. Pete Alonso going deep in the ninth to keep his Mets career going a little longer. Then Francisco Lindor sprinting for a double play to end it.

October is all about winner-take-all, and the Wild Card round had only one series that went the distance. It didn’t disappoint. The other three series were sweeps. Which brings us to our first takeaway from the wild-card round…

Game 1 is everything

Wild-card sweeps have been the norm under this playoff format.

During the era of the one-off Wild Card Game — which ran from 2012 to 2019 and returned in 2021 — many rued the brutal unfairness of a brilliant season washed away in nine innings. Wouldn’t a three-game series be a better solution than a winner-take-all game?

So far, the answer is … not really. Since the league moved to the three-game Wild Card Series in 2022, the winner of Game 1 has won all 12 series. Only two series have even gone to Game 3. That’s an 83 percent sweep rate.

If we include the 2020 postseason — following the pandemic-shortened season, MLB expanded the playoff field and staged eight three-game wild-card series — only twice in 20 tries has the Game 1 loser come back to win the series (A’s and Padres in 2020). Sixteen have been sweeps.

This is still a small sample of series, but it has taken some air out of the balloon. The league would love to have each Wild Card series go three games. Instead, almost every series has been decided in Game 1.

And if that’s the case, you’d better have a Game 1 ace.

Respect the Crown (and the chaos)

The Detroit Tigers had a winning formula for the Wild Card Series: a Triple Crown winner in Game 1, and what manager A.J. Hinch called “pitching chaos” in Game 2. Let the ace set the stage, and let everyone else close the curtain.

Whether it was Tarik Skubal for the Tigers, Michael King for the Padres or Cole Ragans for the Royals, three of the four teams that got ace-caliber performances in the wild-card opener wound up sweeping. After Skubal tossed six shutout innings against Houston in Game 1, the Tigers cycled through seven relievers in Game 2. King’s 12-strikeout gem in Game 1 left the Braves reeling and the Padres bullpen fresh for Joe Musgrove’s injury-shortened start in Game 2. It was a similar story for the Royals, whose bullpen was up to the task after Seth Lugo was pulled in the fifth inning of Game 2 in Baltimore.

Corbin Burnes also delivered an ace performance in Game 1, allowing one run over eight innings in his final start before free agency, but Bobby Witt Jr. drove in the game’s only run. The O’s managed only one run in the sweep.

Chris Sale, the NL Triple Crown winner, didn’t even make the Braves wild-card roster. With Sale suffering from back spasms, the Braves had AJ Smith-Shawver to start Game 1. He lasted only four outs. The Braves never had a chance. The Houston Astros also fell behind early when ace Framber Valdez continued last year’s postseason woes. Houston was bounced in two games. The most dominant starts in the Brewers-Mets series came not from aces but the Game 3 starters, José Quintana and Tobias Myers.

Home-field blues

When we wrote about each contender’s down-the-stretch schedule, we spent a lot of words on the jockeying for byes and home-field advantage in the Wild Card Series. The former? Critically important. (Just ask the 91-win Orioles and the 93-win Brewers.) The latter? Well, how much does home field matter in this round?

The home team has won only nine of 20 three-game Wild Card Series since 2020.

Removing 2020 from the equation, because ballparks were empty and the playoff field was watered down, the home team has fared even worse in the Wild Card Series, losing eight of 12 series.

There’s no logical reason for this to be true. No team would choose to play on the road rather than at home. But perhaps home field matters far less in a three-game series than other factors: like an ace.

That doubleheader made a mess 

The Braves pitching staff had been in trouble since Spencer Strider’s elbow started barking back in spring training, but it was completely finished when Hurricane Helene forced a Monday makeup doubleheader, during which Sale was added to the lengthy list of injured Braves.

Smith-Shawver starting Game 1 with neither Austin Riley nor Ronald Acuña Jr. in the lineup? That wasn’t the Braves team anyone was expecting back in March. But by the time they were swept, Atlanta was in tatters. The Braves emptied the bullpen to split the doubleheader against the Mets, deployed a spot starter for the first game of the playoffs and then had to cover for Max Fried’s two-inning start in the second game.

They were gassed.

The other half of that season-ending doubleheader was the Mets. Luis Severino pitched well enough in Game 1 to give them a fighting chance in the Wild Card Series, sticking around for six innings despite a lot of traffic early. The cracks started showing in Game 3. After Quintana turned in six shutout innings, Buttó blew the stalemate and, all of a sudden, closer Edwin Díaz was putting out a fire in the seventh inning. Even fully rested, the Mets bullpen didn’t possess a top-tier bullpen. Exhausted, they’re more likely to break down. It was David Peterson — a starter — who put the Brewers away by saving Game 3.

The Central is dead (Long live the Central)

A few AL execs were chatting earlier this year about how MLB balancing its schedule was going to help powerful divisions (like the AL East) and hurt weaker divisions (like the AL Central). That was the idea, anyway.

But the AL Central has three of the final four teams in the American League (the Royals, Tigers and Guardians) while the East has only the Yankees. The Rays, Red Sox and Blue Jays missed the tournament, and the Orioles are already headed home.

Last season, the AL Central had only one team with a winning record while the AL East had four.

The NL Central was mostly a disappointment this season. The Brewers were their only hope to make postseason noise, but they’ve now lost their past six playoff series and gone 2-10 in postseason games since 2019. It appeared for a brief window of time Thursday night, after Jake Bauers and Sal Frelick went yard, that half the remaining playoff teams would be from the middle of the country. Instead, Alonso knocked out the NL Central entirely.

Momentum matters

There’s a natural instinct to assume teams that come screaming into the playoff picture late in the season will be found out once the playoffs begin. Their flaws will be exposed. They were pretenders, after all.

Then along come the Tigers and Mets. The Tigers’ playoff odds were 0.2 percent on Aug. 11, the Mets’ 13.1 percent on Aug. 28. Neither had entered the season as anything more than a midfield team. They were roughly .500 teams in the first half. And then, outrageous things happened. The Tigers traded their No. 2 starter and a few other vets, and couldn’t stop winning. The Mets fiddled with the knobs on their pitching staff, found something offensively and made miracles happen in Game 161.

In this round, neither was exposed. The Tigers kept rolling. Their ace was better than the other guys’ ace, and their lineup provided timely hits. The Mets’ win wasn’t a fluke. They pitched well, caused havoc and rallied when it mattered against one of the best pitching staffs — and best closers — in baseball.

We lump the Tigers and Mets together, in part, because we had them last in our postseason pitching core ranking. Not because we thought they were trash, but because some team had to be last, and because it seemed that at some point the second-half smoke and mirrors would stop working. Not so. Two old sayings are true for those two teams:

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

And no one wants to see these guys in October.

Five teams won at least 16 games in September. Three — the Tigers, Padres and Mets — won a Wild Card Series. A fourth, the Los Angeles Dodgers, earned a first-round bye. The only wild-card team that didn’t have a winning second-half record was the Orioles, who went 33-33 and were knocked out in two games — perhaps not good news for the NL favorite Philadelphia Phillies, who were also 33-33 after the break.

You can’t predict ball

Some aces were aces, and some stars were stars — you did your families proud, Alonso, Witt and Fernando Tatis Jr. — but in the postseason, not all heroes wear All-Star and Silver Slugger capes. Some are just dudes who show up when they’re needed most.

The high-profile Padres hit three home runs in their series, and two of them came from No. 9 hitter Kyle Higashioka. The Brewers’ Game 2 comeback started with Rookie of the Year candidate Jackson Chourio, but it was Garrett Mitchell who hit the game-winning homer. Skubal lived up to his billing for the Tigers, but it was swingman Beau Brieske who closed Game 1 and pitched 1 2/3 scoreless innings in Game 2. Which second baseman led the Wild Card round in hits and doubles? Not Jose Altuve. It was Brewers speedster Brice Turang.

Some of the biggest swings in the Wild Card Series were from Andy Ibañez, Jesse Winker and Frelick. Some of the most pivotal punchouts were thrown by Will Vest, Nick Mears and Sam Long.

October is when even the most anonymous big leaguer can become a household name.

(Top photos of Kyle Higashioka, left, and Will Vest and Jake Rogers, right: Orlando Ramirez, Alex Stiltz / Getty Images)