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By the end of tonight, we could have our two World Series teams. But the World Series doesn’t start until Friday, so there’s a very real chance that we will have four consecutive days during the playoffs without any baseball games. (That’s a big bummer to think about).
For all the excitement of this postseason, all the close games and weird plays and surprising stars and upsets, we have had just two do-or-die games—the same number that we had over the first two days of the playoffs every year between 2012 and ’21 (excluding the ’20 postseason, which featured 16 teams after the pandemic-shortened 60-game season). I can understand why a lot of the teams and many of the players wanted to get rid of the single-elimination wild-card game; they didn’t want a 162-game season to come down to one contest. Yet those games provided baseball with the one thing it seems to lack when compared to other sports: appointment viewing with the highest stakes imaginable to begin the postseason.
