Will Brewers' bye hurt or help them? Here's what MLB history says
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Though common sense tells you that it benefits a team to get a playoff bye, you won't have to look far to find lingering sentiment that extended time off can also cause a team to lose its momentum.
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The Milwaukee Brewers, for the second straight postseason, will have a bye and skip past the wild-card round of the postseason, straight into the National League Division Series.
Before 2022, even the best teams in baseball played postseason baseball quickly after the end of the regular season, with no real bye built into the format.
Now, the top two teams in each league will have a full five days off, having played their regular-season finale Sunday, Sept. 27, and not stepping into the batter's box again until Saturday, Oct. 3.
Is it better to get that rest or be the team that "gets hot" late in the season and rides that wave all the way through the wild-card round?
Unfortunately, we only have four years of data to work with. Here's what we do know:
2025: Three of the four byes advanced, but the fourth was important
The Brewers won the National League Division Series over the Chicago Cubs last year, 3-2, after finishing with the best record in the regular season. In the American League, the Seattle Mariners and Toronto Blue Jays also moved on with ALDS wins after a first-round bye. Just like this year, the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox met in a wild-card game, though the winning team (the Yankees) lost to Toronto, 3-1.
The fly in the ointment last year was the Los Angeles Dodgers, presumed to be among the World Series favorites even though they were the No. 3 seed in the postseason. But the Dodgers took care of the Cincinnati Reds, the Philadelphia Phillies and the Brewers in the NL – dropping just one game in the process – before winning an epic World Series over Toronto.
So, while the bye served most teams well, the one team that didn't have the bye won the whole thing.
2024: Three of the four teams with byes advanced, and top seeds reached the World Series
The year before, the top seed in the AL and the NL both reached the World Series, and the team with the most wins in baseball — the Dodgers — won the World Series. All was just in the world.
Along with Cleveland, three of the four teams that got wild-card-round byes advanced, though the Guardians and Dodgers both needed the full five games to do it.
The New York Mets, the No. 6 seed in the National League – who, of course, beat the Brewers in the wild-card round – advanced past No. 2 seed Philadelphia in their series, 3-1.
2023: Three of the four teams with byes ... did not advance
The year before was a completely different story.
Only Houston, the No. 2 seed in the American League, advanced out of the divisional round, with upsets the rest of the way — and more than that, none of those series went the full five games. And then the Astros didn't make the World Series, either.
AL top seed Baltimore didn't win a playoff game, falling to eventual World Series champion Texas, the No. 5 seed. NL top seed Atlanta, a squad that won 104 games, lost to the No. 4-seeded Phillies, 3-1. And the No. 2-seeded Dodgers, another 100-win team, lost to No. 6 seed Arizona, 3-0.
Arizona and Texas — again, both wild-card round teams — advanced to the World Series, while three 100-plus-win teams combined to win a grand total of one playoff game, and all four byes were eliminated before the Fall Classic.
2022: Two bye teams advanced, two didn't
The top seed in the AL, the Houston Astros (106-56), wound up winning the World Series. They didn't lose a game in sweeping No. 5 seed Seattle in the divisional round and the No. 2 seed New York Yankees in the ALCS, then defeated No. 6 Philadelphia in the World Series, 4-2.
The Yankees needed a full five games but were able to hold serve and defeat the third-seeded Guardians in the ALDS. So, both teams with byes advanced in the AL. But both of the NL's top teams were eliminated in four games at the division-series level.
No. 5 San Diego beat a crazy-good, 111-51 Dodgers team, 3-1. No. 6 Philadelphia likewise eliminated 101-61 Atlanta, 3-1. It proved to be a horrendous year for elite NL teams, with a 101-61 Mets team relegated to the wild-card round, where it lost to the Padres.
In sum, 56% of the teams in the current format to have a bye advanced to the championship series (nine of 16). It's certainly emblematic, in a small sample, of the idea that any team can win a baseball playoff series, particularly when nothing but top teams are involved.
What about MLB teams that clinch playoff spots early?
Bleacher Report posted a story in 2018 that looked at "early clinchers" — teams that locked up a playoff spot early in September — and found that half of them dropped out early, and the other half performed well in the playoffs, with a couple of champions over the 10-year window it examined.
It's almost as if records and early clinches don't matter at all in October.
As a related aside, teams that came through the single-game wild-card format (2012-2021) didn't have a great track record of staying hot all the way to the World Series, with only two of a possible 18 teams making it that far.
But the two that did — the 2019 Washington Nationals and 2014 San Francisco Giants — won the whole thing.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Will Brewers' bye hurt or help them? Here's what MLB history says