Carl, to respond to your question, even if the wild-card play-in game were expanded to a short series, the better team wouldn’t be guaranteed to win. The math works out so that the better team gets a bigger advantage the longer the series is, and the jump from one to three is minimal.
That’s a graph from a guy named Matt Lane showing the probability of winning a series (on the vertical axis) against the probability of winning a single game (on the horizontal). Each curve represents a different series length: blue is one game, turquoise is three, green is five and red is seven. As you can see, for most playoff matchups (where the probability of winning a single game between nearly matched teams is close to 0.5), the difference between the blue line and turquoise line is small.
Carl Bialik
Home, Bitter Home
The home teams in the first seven wild-card play-in games have won just twice. (The Pirates hosted games the past two years and are 1-1.) That’s a 29 percent success rate, admittedly in a very small sample size. And it could drop to 25 percent after this tough start for Pittsburgh: The Cubs have a 57 percent chance of winning now that they’re up 1-0 in the bottom of the first. And that doesn’t take into account how dominant Jake Arrieta has been lately (0.75 ERA since the All-Star Break).
By contrast, during the regular season home teams won 54 percent of games.
Neil Paine
The Pirates and Cubs are a couple of franchises that have been around forever, but the 2015 editions rank among the best they’ve ever had. According to our Elo ratings — combining their end-of-season, season-average and maximum ratings from the regular season — this is the 18th-best Pirates team ever (the best since 1991) and the 27th-best Cubs team of all time (though only the best since 2008).
To echo what will surely be a theme all night, it’s a shame one of these great teams has to see its season end tonight.
