Young Stars, Second-Guessing Season and the Feel-Good Twins: Takeaways from MLB’s Blink-and-You’ll-Miss-It Wild-Card Round
Here’s our recap of the wild-card round — all sweeps. The biggest loser might be the Braves, whose World Series road got much harder with the Phillies advancing to the divisional round.
MLB’s wild-card round came and went in the blink of an eye, with each of the four series being two-game sweeps. Decisive as the matchups were, though, they were not without surprises nor lessons about the rest of the playoffs ahead. Let’s dig into five major storylines from the first set of postseason games and set the stage for the mayhem yet to come.
Nerds Ruin Baseball?
The worst managerial decision of the wild-card round belonged to the Blue Jays’ John Schneider, who yanked starter Jose Berrios one batter into the fourth inning in Game 2 against the Minnesota Twins. Berrios hadn’t allowed a run yet, and he’d only thrown 47 pitches. Reliever Yusei Kikuchi promptly allowed the next three batters to reach base, with two runs scoring and ultimately ending Toronto’s season. Going back to 2000, Berrios’s 47 pitches were the fewest by any legit starter (i.e., not a short-start gimmick opener) who’d struck out five while allowing one run or fewer in a postseason start.
It was an eyebrow-raising quick hook, and it backfired badly. Predictably, fans and pundits directed their anger at the influence of analytics over modern in-game management. And it’s hard to imagine a pitcher like Berrios getting pulled so prematurely in any other era.
But this wasn’t quite the same as Tampa Bay’s infamous decision to yank a cruising Blake Snell in Game 6 of the 2020 World Series, either. The rationale for that move was the so-called times-through-the-order penalty, the phenomenon that starters get far less effective when batters see their stuff a third time. In Berrios’s case, though, he had already faced the top of the Twins’ order in the third inning, and was only making his way through them for the second time anyway.
More likely, Schneider’s folly was the product of a manager getting too cute with lefty-righty matchups — the southpaw Kikuchi was scheduled to face back-to-back lefties — in an elimination game with all pitching hands being on call. And that story is one even older than the one about nerds ruining baseball with their calculators.
The Big Picture
As was the case before the postseason began, the Atlanta Braves are big favorites to win it all when we look at a combination of the odds from the betting market and advanced stats. Atlanta will go into the division series with a 26% chance of winning the World Series, a full 10 points higher than the second-highest team (the Houston Astros, at 16%). But that doesn’t mean anything is guaranteed for the Braves — or any of the top seeds.
Atlanta’s odds of making the NLCS actually dropped when the Philadelphia Phillies beat the Miami Marlins in the wild-card round, setting up a rematch with a dangerous foe from last year’s postseason — so dangerous, in fact, that Atlanta lost to Philly in four games. The Braves would have had a much easier path against Miami and its negative-57 run differential; instead, they’ll face Bryce Harper, Nick Castellanos and a Zack Wheeler/Aaron Nola-led rotation that could very easily spoil Atlanta’s 104-win season.
None of the other high seeds saw their odds drop quite as much based on who they’ll play in the division series, but all will have their hands full nonetheless.
Though the Los Angeles Dodgers went 8-5 against the Arizona Diamondbacks in the regular season and have a 61% chance to advance, the D-backs are the perfect team for MLB’s 2023 rules — and these are the postseason Dodgers we’re talking about. Along similar lines, the Houston Astros are favored (57%) versus the Minnesota Twins, but they went 2-4 against Minnesota during the regular season, and the Twins are sneaky-good on both sides of the ball (more on that later).
Finally, there are the Baltimore Orioles — seeded No. 1 in the AL, yet actually underdogs to advance to the ALCS (48%) according to our cocktail of odds. Part of that is because the stats and oddsmakers don’t quite know how good the O’s really are, but the Rangers are also deep and talented enough to beat the higher-seed team.
The Kids Are Alright
One of the most exciting themes of the wild-card series was the incredible performances of so many young players carrying their teams to the next round. According to data from SportRadar, 44.2% of runs in the wild-card round were driven in by batters who are age 25 or younger — which would be the highest share in any postseason since 1995 if it holds up over the rest of the playoffs. (The 2017 postseason saw 35.9% of RBIs come from the 25-and-under set.)
Among that group of stellar young players, we got to see Corbin Carroll do his usual Corbin Carroll things for the Diamondbacks; the NL Rookie of the Year favorite went 4-for-7 with a double, a HR, two walks and three runs scored against Milwaukee. We watched as 21-year-old Texas rookie Evan Carter exploded on the postseason scene with a pair of doubles and a HR against the Rays less than a month after his MLB debut, while teammate Josh Jung had a 1.208 OPS in the same series. Royce Lewis of the Twins had a monster playoff debut — 2 HRs and 8 total bases — in Game 1 against Toronto on Tuesday, and grand-slamming Bryson Stott became the youngest Phillie to ever have 4 RBIs in a postseason game on Wednesday night.
All of this is also before presumptive AL Rookie of the Year Gunnar Henderson makes his postseason debut for the Orioles in the ALDS. If you like seeing ridiculous amounts of young talent, these playoffs are a great time to be a baseball fan.
How Far Can the Twins Travel?
In Jeff Passan’s postseason preview column at ESPN, he relayed this note about the Twins from an anonymous scout: "You'll look smart if you pick them to win the pennant."
That might have sounded silly to say about a team with the worst record of any division winner, much less one that had lost 18 straight playoff games heading into the wild-card matchup against the Blue Jays. But with that streak a thing of the past, it’s easier to look at Minnesota and see nothing but upside.
As we noted before the playoffs, the Twins had the best starting rotation (and second-best staff overall) in MLB by wins above replacement this season. That was on display in the wild-card sweep, as Sonny Gray and Pablo Lopez delivered solid starts and the bullpen held Toronto to an anemic .453 OPS. Some of the team’s offensive injury concerns were also lessened with Lewis and Correa returning to the lineup and hitting well.
Since it is no longer true that the Twins hadn’t won a postseason series since 2002, we can all safely admit that this team — which ranked sixth in FanGraphs’ predictive BaseRuns winning percentage during the regular season — could actually be a real World Series threat.
It’s Not How You Start, It’s How You Finish
While less jarring than it was under the old single-elimination format, the wild-card round remains impressive for the speed with which it can wreck a once-promising campaign. Just ask the Tampa Bay Rays, who seemed destined for the World Series at various times throughout the regular season — particularly when they started out a scorching 13-0, tied for the longest undefeated run to start a season since 1901 — only to be unceremoniously bounced from the playoffs by Texas in a two-game sweep.
While Tampa Bay quickly came down from their early peak, getting chased down by the Orioles in the AL East in mid-July and having to settle for a wild-card berth, the Rays will still go down tied with the 1970 Twins for the second-best winning percentage (.667) in the first half of a season among teams that later went winless in the playoffs, since 1969. (The 1976 Phillies own No. 1 on that dubious list, going 56-25 in the first half of their schedule — a .691 win % — before getting swept out of the playoffs in the end.)
And at least those teams could say they made the league championship series, because there were no wild cards back then. Even the 2022 New York Yankees, who had their own very similar first-half hot streak and second-half regression, won in the wild-card round before getting swept out of the ALDS. But for the Rays, a historic season start and 99 regular season wins amounted to a postseason run that lasted only a couple of days.
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