Does the MLB Playoff Bye Help or Hurt? What Four Years Show
Every October the same theory returns: the first-round bye cools off baseball's best teams. Four years of results say the bye helps, just less than its reputation suggests.
Is a week off the best prize in baseball, or a trap? The Tampa Bay Rays, Cleveland Guardians, Milwaukee Brewers and Los Angeles Dodgers are about to find out. All four skipped the Wild Card Series, which ran Sept. 29 to Oct. 1, and open the Division Series on Saturday, Oct. 3, having sat out the first round entirely.
Every October since Major League Baseball expanded to a 12-team bracket in 2022, the same argument resurfaces: the teams that earn a bye go cold, and the wild-card survivors arrive hot. The record from the first four years of the format gives a clearer answer than the talk-radio version, though not the one either side usually wants.
Who gets a first-round bye in the MLB playoffs?
The bye goes to the top two seeds in each league, and those seeds are reserved for division winners. As Yahoo Sports laid out the rule: The Nos. 1 and 2 seeds in each league go to the division winners with the two best records. Those teams earn a bye through the wild-card round.
That is why this year's American League bracket looks odd at first glance. The Guardians won the AL Central at 85-77 and got a bye. The New York Yankees went 93-68, eight more wins, and had to play a best-of-three Wild Card Series at home against Boston because they did not win their division. (They swept it.) In the National League the byes went where the records pointed: the Brewers at 103-59 and the Dodgers at 100-62. Tampa Bay took the AL's top seed at 98-64.
The Wild Card Series itself is short on purpose. Yahoo's explainer of the format notes the three-game cap limits extra workload on teams already playing more than the bye clubs, and keeps the rest of October from being pushed back further, with three more rounds still to fit in.
Do MLB teams with a bye do worse in the playoffs?
Here is the full record of bye teams in the Division Series, the round where the "rust" theory would bite hardest:
- 2022: 2-2. Houston and the Yankees advanced; the Dodgers lost to San Diego 3-1 and Atlanta lost to Philadelphia 3-1.
- 2023: 1-3. Houston beat Minnesota; Baltimore was swept by Texas, the Dodgers were swept by Arizona and Atlanta again lost to Philadelphia.
- 2024: 3-1. The Yankees, Guardians and Dodgers advanced; the Phillies lost to the Mets 3-1.
- 2025: 3-1. Toronto beat the Yankees in four games, Seattle beat Detroit in five (the clincher went 15 innings) and Milwaukee beat the Cubs in five; the Phillies fell to the Dodgers.
Add it up and bye teams are 9-7 in the Division Series. That is a winning record, but not by much, and far from what you might expect from clubs that were, on paper, the best in their leagues.
The narrative of a curse comes almost entirely from 2023, and from one franchise in particular. Through the first two years, Atlanta and the Dodgers, two of the best regular-season teams in the sport, lost four straight Division Series between them. A bad October for a couple of 100-win teams is exactly the kind of thing that turns into a theory.
The later evidence cuts the other way. In 2024 and 2025, bye teams went a combined 6-2 in the Division Series. And when MLB.com's analysts looked at the first three years, they concluded there was not enough evidence that the layoff itself hurts teams, pointing instead to how unpredictable short-series baseball is.
So is the bye an advantage?
Yes, though the advantage is quieter than the price of the ticket suggests. The bye's real value is the one nobody argues about: a bye team cannot lose in the Wild Card Series, because it does not play in it. This year's Wild Card round showed how thin that margin is. Houston, the AL's No. 3 seed, was swept at home by the No. 6 Chicago White Sox, and the Cubs, as the NL's fifth seed, were swept by San Diego, CBS Sports' bracket shows. Atlanta needed all three games to get past the Phillies.
Then there is pitching. A bye team gets to line up its rotation for Game 1 of the Division Series, while a wild-card survivor may have burned its best starters just to get there. Randy Arozarena, whose Mariners earned a bye last year and then won their Division Series, put the players' view simply in comments to MLB.com:
"I definitely think winning the division, earning that bye week definitely helps you. It's a lot better than the season ending, and then you just continue to play."
Randy Arozarena, Seattle Mariners outfielder, speaking to MLB.com
Where the bye clearly has not guaranteed anything is the pennant. Of the 16 bye teams from 2022 to 2025, four reached the World Series (Houston in 2022, the Yankees and Dodgers in 2024, Toronto in 2025) and two won it. The 2023 World Series featured no bye teams at all, and last year's champion Dodgers were a No. 3 seed that played in the Wild Card round.
The 2026 test cases
This year offers a cleaner experiment than most. The Brewers and Dodgers are the two best teams in baseball by record, and the Dodgers draw the Braves in the NLDS. The Guardians are the most interesting case in the bracket: a bye team with a worse record than six of the eight clubs that had to play their way in, including the Yankees, who arrive having just swept a rival.
If Cleveland goes out quickly, expect the rust argument to come back louder than ever. It would be worth remembering, if it does, that an 85-win team losing to a 93-win team is not much of a mystery. The small-sample nature of a best-of-five tends to explain October better than the calendar does. For more on how the postseason calendar got this long in the first place, see our explainer on why the World Series now runs so late into the fall.
