FIVE YEARS OF PLAYOFF DRAMA
Baseball’s win-or-go-home wild-card games have been must-see baseball
When Major League Baseball instituted a second wild card and created two play-in games for the 2012 postseason, it turned the playoffs upside down.
Oh, the World Series still determines a champion at the end of it all and provides enough meaningful moments to produce a highlight video in time for the holidays.
Yet if five years of wild-card games taught us anything, it is this: The playoffs arguably reach their zenith at the outset, with a pair of win-or-go home games that provide a greater jolt than the four weeks of series that follow.
“Going through those three years with that experience is something I’ll never forget,” says Los Angeles Dodgers reliever Tony Watson, a member of Pittsburgh Pirates teams that played in the 2013-15 National League wildcard games. “It’s intense from the national anthem, to them calling your name to go out to the line, to the fans being in it because the loser’s going home.
“It’s a wild game, no pun intended.”
We’ll allow it.
From unlikely heroes, to boozed-up fans directly impacting the result, to stunning playoff runs for the survivors, Bud Selig ’s last sweeping act of legislation altered October baseball forever.
Tuesday night, the New York Yankees and Minnesota Twins will meet in the American League wild-card game, followed Wednesday by the division rivals Colorado Rockies and Arizona Diamondback in the NL.
Many of them have no idea what they’re in for.
Fan-demonium
Jason Motte was the closer for the World Series-winning St. Louis Cardinals in 2011, yet nothing quite prepared him for the first NL wild-card game in Atlanta.
“Strike 1 of the game, the crowd is losing their mind,” he said of the Turner Field atmosphere in 2012. “And Ball 1, if you’re the visiting pitcher, they’re like, ‘Yyyyyyyeahh!’ I’m thinking, ‘Holy mackerel.’ ”
Motte was warming up to enter this caldron in the eighth inning, the Cardinals nursing a 6-3 lead and two runners on, when Andrelton Simmons’ pop fly fell between shortstop Pete Kozma and left fielder Matt Holliday in not-so-shallow left field.
Bases loaded, just one out — until it wasn’t.
The umpires’ ruling that the infield fly rule was still in effect created chaos: As Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez confronted umpires, a hailstorm of bottles and cans littered the field.
Motte was summoned to get the inning ’s final out, but his mind was only partially on retiring Brian McCann. His wife was six months pregnant with their first child, clad in Cardinals gear at a suddenly hostile Turner Field.
“I really hoped nobody did anything crazy, throw something at my wife or harmed our little girl,” says Motte, who pitched for the Braves in 2017. “I proceeded to walk McCann on four straight and threw two more balls to (Michael) Bourn.
“Then Yadi (Molina) came out and said I needed to calm down. I was more worried about her. Yadi said, ‘ Hey, we’ve got security. Everybody’s fine.’ ”
Motte struck out Bourn and pitched a perfect ninth.
He was lucky — Atlanta was never known as a hockey town.
One year later, the Cincinnati Reds were down 1-0 to the Pirates on a night Pittsburgh hosted its first playoff game in 21 years. In the second inning, PNC Park fans got the idea to serenade Reds starter Johnny Cueto with a singsong chant — “Cue-to! Cue-to!” — as he prepared to face Russell Martin. And Cueto dropped the ball on the mound.
“Like an opposing goaltender in a hockey net,” Watson recalls. “He drops the ball, and Russ hits a homer on the next pitch.”
Cueto did not make it out of the fourth inning.
No market mixes suds and support like Toronto. Sure, last year’s AL wild-card match will be remembered for Edwin Encarnacion’s mammoth walk-off home run and Baltimore Orioles manager Buck Showalter’s inability to use closer Zack Britton over 11 innings of high-leverage baseball.
But Blue Jays fans made their presence felt throughout, particu- larly when an overserved newspaper editor tossed a nearly full can of beer onto the field, a crime to which he later confessed.
The bottle missed Baltimore outfielder Hyun-Soo Kim.
“We expected them to be pretty rowdy, and they didn’t disappoint,” Orioles reliever Darren O’Day says. “It was nuts, absolute pandemonium. We go extras, they end up walking us off, but it was still an awesome game. If that was a pay-per-view game, you wouldn’t be disappointed.”
Momentum is real
Other than creating more television product, the wild-card game exists ostensibly to reward division winners. Burn your ace in the winner-take-all game, the theory goes, and the survivor will be at a disadvantage in the division series. Yet the wild card is as likely to create a monster as it is a disadvantage.
Wild-card winners are 5-5 in division series play, a remarkable record given that their No. 1 is generally unavailable until Game 3 and they are always opening, and closing, on the road.
Of the five wild-card winners who lost in the division series, three pushed it to a decisive fifth game.
“You felt like you’d already been in a Game 7,” says O’Day, whose Orioles won the inaugural wildcard game in 2012 before losing a five-game ALDS to the Yankees.
In 2014, the Kansas City Royals and San Francisco Giants went from wild-card hopefuls all the way to the World Series, as the Giants rode ace Madison Bumgarner over the Pirates and on to a championship.
The Royals? They overcame deficits of 2-0, 7-3 and 8-7 to win a 9-8, 12-inning wild-card epic over the Oakland Athletics.
“I’ll be honest, I don’t remember a lot about the game, and I think it’s because of the energy and adrenaline that’s flowing in a situation like that,” says Sean Doolittle, the Washington Nationals closer who served the same role for the A’s that year. “It makes the team that wins super-dangerous.”
Indeed, the Royals didn’t lose again until Game 1 of the World Series.
A fair shake?
With so many No. 2 wild cards prospering — they are 7-3 despite having to play on the road — it raises questions of whether the current system is equitable. After all, these are clubs that previously would not have had a playoff ticket.
The question haunts the Pirates — they averaged 93 wins from
2013 to 2015 and would have had automatic spots in the NLDS under the previous system. In this new reality, they had to play the wild-card game every year, losing to Bumgarner and, after winning
98 games in 2015, Jake Arrieta and the Cubs.
“The team we had was unbelievable. Yeah, I thought we could’ve won the World Series that year,” says Pirates infielder Sean Rodriguez, who would like to see the playoffs reseeded after the wild-card round, similar to the NBA.
Still, the knockout games create October thrills and, for players involved, a rush that can’t be replicated.
“It’s non-stop motion in your body,” says Rodriguez, immortalized in 2015 for his punchout of a water cooler. “You don’t stop moving; you don’t stop feeling that crowd. Sometimes you get caught in the moment.”