How The Cubs Won The NL Wild-Card Game

The Pirates had the fourth-worst defense in MLB this year, per FanGraphs, and their shaky hands — or slippery gloves — contributed to the run they yielded in the top of the first inning. After Dexter Fowler led off with a single, his steal of second was aided by a drop, and he later scored on a single. Then Anthony Rizzo reached first thanks to a throwing error by second baseman Neil Walker, though the ball looked catchable off the hop but caromed off first baseman Sean Rodriguez’s glove. Pirates manager Clint Hurdle, aware of his team’s defensive shortcomings, played Rodriguez instead of Pedro Alvarez in part because of Rodriguez’s superior glove. But it hasn’t been sure so far.

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.

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.