Baseball Bytes: Wild Card Wrap-up, Division Series Duels
Taking stock of the MLB postseason so far.
Welcome to Baseball Bytes1 — a column in which I point out several byte-sized pieces of information that jumped out to me from my various baseball spreadsheets. If you’ve noticed a Baseball Byte of your own, email me and I’ll feature it in a future column!
⚾ Looking Back
For this special ✨Postseason Edition✨ of the column, let’s start with a few observations from the Wild Card series (which wrapped up so quickly, as always):
Upsets Aplenty: Looking at the pre-playoff odds, the San Diego Padres (who beat the Atlanta Braves) were the only Wild Card favorite to escape the first round of the postseason. The rest of the most likely teams to move on — the Houston Astros, Baltimore Orioles and Milwaukee Brewers — all bowed out, a testament to how easily a team can get ousted if they get thrown into the best-2-out-of-3 gauntlet that is the Wild Card round under this current format.
Bring Out The Brooms: Additionally, three of the four series ended in 2-0 sweeps, with the Mets-Brewers matchup being the lone exception. We’ve now had three years of this series-based Wild Card format, and of the 12 total series MLB has staged, 10 of the 12 have been sweeps! That’s fascinating. And of the 10 sweeps, 6 have been by the lower-seeded team, so you can’t say it’s a product of the fact that the higher seed hosts every game at home (which we might have otherwise expected to help drive this phenomenon). What does it mean? I have no idea. Maybe something to dig into more in the future.
They’re Gone: As part of the high frequency of upsets, we lost four teams who had, at some point, ranked No. 1 in the league in Elo rating this season:
Each could credibly have made the case that they would advance deep into October and maybe even hoist that shiny piece of metal known as the Commissioner's Trophy. Instead, they’ll spend the offseason analyzing what went wrong — and how to prevent it in the future. (What that means in each case is also interesting: Baltimore and Milwaukee were among the youngest good teams in MLB, while Atlanta and Houston are both former champions who are on the older side.)
⚾ Looking Ahead
Now, we pivot to the Division Series matchups ahead. And let’s start by resetting the odds after the Wild Card round, courtesy of my Playoff Predictor model:
Some quick thoughts:
A four-team race? A quartet of teams now stand out above the rest in the World Series odds: the Yankees, Dodgers, Phillies and Padres, each of whom is above 14 percent (while nobody else is at 9 percent). Two of those squads have to immediately play each other — L.A. and San Diego (literally Elo’s top 2 teams) will face off in the NLDS — but the winner of that series will have a 33 percent chance of being your 2024 champion, whoever it may be. And on the other side of the bracket, the Yankees benefited from all of the AL’s upsets; they gained 4.1 points of championship probability since the start of the playoffs despite not even playing a game. At 39 percent, they now have by far the best pennant odds of any team.
Rivalry Renewed: To get there, however, the Yankees will have to get through Kansas City in a series that revisits the great N.Y.-K.C. battles of the late 1970s and early ‘80s. In the five postseasons from 1976 through 1980, New York and Kansas City played each other for the American League crown four times. The Yankees won three of those, going on to lose the World Series to Cincinnati in 1976 and beating the Dodgers in 1977 and 1978. But the Royals beat N.Y. in 1980, winning in a sweep thanks to this mammoth George Brett HR:
Sure, they went on to lose against the Phillies in the World Series, which delayed K.C.’s first-ever championship by five years (before they won in 1985). But between those postseason battles and the infamous Pine Tar Incident — which came during the 1983 regular season — the Yankees and Royals had arguably the most bitter rivalry of that entire era. It’s going to be great to see it renewed in this year’s ALDS.
A World Series Brewing For the Mets? Reader
pointed out a fascinating trend from recent postseasons… The team who eliminated the Brewers has gone on to the World Series in each of their past five playoff appearances: the 2018 Dodgers, 2019 Nationals, 2020 Dodgers, 2021 Braves and 2023 Diamondbacks. Now, the loveable, confusing and chaotic Mets have a chance to join that club. At 15.5 percent, they have the lowest pennant probability of any remaining team, and they are 60-40 underdogs right away against the mighty Phillies in the NLDS. But the Mets are clearly not afraid of long odds. And if they are a Team of Destiny, maybe this pattern of World Series paths through the Brewers is just the latest piece of evidence in New York’s favor.Most Likely Upset: But if we move beyond the realm of superstitions and mysticism, the true best bet among lower-seeded teams in the Division Series is actually the gritty Detroit Tigers at 46.9 percent to beat the Cleveland Guardians. This will be a referendum on the true quality of a Cleveland team that the stats have been skeptical of for most of the year, as the Guardians finished the regular season just 17th in BaseRuns-predicted winning percentage — the lowest of any playoff team.
The Tigers were only slightly better, and both teams have shaky starting rotations when their aces (Tarik Skubal, who has been awesome recently, for Detroit; Tanner Bibee for Cleveland) aren’t on the hill. In fact, they’re actually pretty much mirror-images of each other, from their pitching staffs to their young makeup (CLE had MLB’s youngest roster; DET was No. 3) and a lack of offensive firepower aside from a few names (Jose Ramirez and Steven Kwan for the Guardians; Riley Greene and, for some reason, Kerry Carpenter for the Tigers). That makes for the closest to a 50-50 matchup we’ll get this round.
⚾ Fall Classic Futures
Finally, I’ll leave you with an updated matrix of possible World Series matchups, based on the current odds:
Filed under: Baseball, Baseball Bytes
Not to be confused with Baseball Bits, the excellent YouTube series from Foolish Baseball.