Division winners’ long spell on sidelines real wild card in MLB championship chase
Rest provides unique challenge for teams used to daily grind, writes Barry Svrluga.
Is it Friday yet?
The 162nd game of the Washington Nationals’ season ended at 7:28 p.m. Sunday. Try filling the time between that final out and the first pitch of the club’s post-season Friday against the Cubs.
That’s 119 hours, 57 minutes. “The next four days are going to be a lot of fun to just relax mentally, physically for everybody in this clubhouse,” Bryce Harper said. “I’m excited to hang out with my family and enjoy that with them — and look forward to Friday.”
As if it will ever get here. This is, actually, serious stuff. No other sport is defined by daily rhythms like baseball. Between April 3 and Oct. 1 — two days shy of six months — the Nationals had back-to-back days off twice: once in May, when they had a scheduled day off followed by a rainout, and then a four-day break for the all-star game, in which five of their players participated.
And the task now? Chill for four days, then somehow, as manager Dusty Baker said, “come out smoking on Friday.”
The layoff for baseball’s six division winners — this year three days for the American League teams, four days for the National League — is the only lousy aspect of the current playoff format. The wild-card game is, to be sure, a nine-inning tightrope walk of which you want no part. Too harrowing. Too risky.
New York hosts Minnesota in the AL wild-card game Tuesday, while Wednesday’s NL wild-card game sees Colorado heading to Arizona.
But what if you win it? The schedule for a wild-card winner is at least a distant cousin of the regular season: Game 162, a day off, the all-or-nothing playoff game, another day off, then the division series. What the Nats — and the Cubs and the Dodgers — are experiencing can’t be traced back to the regular season’s ancestry.
That has to play a role in how much success wild-card winners have had since the current format was introduced in 2012.
In 2014, San Francisco and Kansas City used wild-card victories to shoot all the way to the World Series. The record of wild-card teams in division series against the top seed: 5-5. Even money.
The Nats don’t face the wildcard winner. But they do face the layoff and they must figure out how to handle it. It’s not what will determine whether or not they beat the Cubs. But it’s a factor that they haven’t handled particularly well in the past.
The Nationals’ three previous post-season appearances have all come with the current playoff structure and they have all come after division titles, never even with a true pennant race to push them across the finish line. Once, in 2012, they had three days off before playing Game 1 — and they beat the Cardinals that day. Twice, in both 2014 and again last year, they had four days between the end of the regular season and the post-season opener. They lost the first game of the division series both times, scoring just two runs against the Giants in 2014 and three runs against the Dodgers last year.
“We’re going to have a bunch of days off here, so we need to stay in rhythm as much as we can,” said 38-year-old Jayson Werth, who wasn’t removed from Sunday’s monstrosity until the ninth inning. “Sometimes those off days can be tough on good teams.”
The Cubs, facing the same layoff as Washington, will try to fill the off days by playing simulated games on Tuesday and Wednesday at Wrigley Field before travelling Wednesday evening and working out at Nationals Park on Thursday. But the Cubs didn’t sputter to the finish, going 13-4 down the stretch, putting further behind their (inexplicably) slow start.
The Nats did sputter — understandably, given they haven’t played a truly important game in five months. Still. After clinching the National League East title Sept. 10, Washington went 9-9 over the remainder of the schedule. Yes, Baker often used patched-together lineups, trying to balance the need for rest with the need to remain sharp. But the Nats also played some sloppy baseball in that time, the kind that is supposed to be cleansed from championship-calibre teams when the calendar says October. Yet it can fester.
Baker’s schedule called for a day off Monday — just like the Cubs — followed by workouts with some live pitching Tuesday and Wednesday. Not fully simulated games, but ... well, you have to do something and it’s guesswork on how to deal with it.
“We’ll go back to fundamentals,” Baker said and that’s full-on spring-training mode with pitchers’ fielding practice, infielders taking rounds of ground balls, outfielders shagging flies and hitting the cutoff, going over signs — the rhythms of February resurfacing in October.
Who knows? Maybe the four days off slow down the Cubs and tighten up the Nats. Maybe what Washington needed to awaken a sluggish offence was simply meaningful at-bats in a pressurized situation. Any of that is possible.
It’s a lot to think about while you twiddle your thumbs and stare into space.