4/2/2023 0 Comments Mlb wild card![]() The Wild Card round is an opening ceremony, and an effective one. But just outcomes, nice as they are, are hardly the point. The better teams won this year’s games New York and Arizona both had more regular-season wins, the truest indicators of quality, than their counterparts. “This was an incredible game.” The slugger Paul Goldschmidt, who had hit a three-run homer, concurred: “That’s one of the best games I’ve ever been a part of, if not the best.” After the slowness of the summer, the Wild Card reintroduces everyone to the craziness of the fall. “After today, I think pretty much I’ve seen everything,” the Arizona manager Torey Lovullo said late in the night. The Diamondbacks’s Archie Bradley encapsulated the up-and-down madness, becoming the first relief pitcher in playoff history to hit a triple and, an inning later, allowing back-to-back home runs. ![]() The Arizona Diamondbacks jumped out to an early 6-0 lead over the Colorado Rockies and then set about giving it back scores of 6-4 and 8-7 came on the way to an eventual, anxious 11-8 Arizona win. If the AL Wild Card game spoke to a manager’s sway, the next evening’s National League installment showed that, sometimes, postseason baseball resists all design. “He extended some guys probably past their comfort zone,” Molitor said. Afterward, the Twins manager Paul Molitor expressed admiration for Girardi’s gutsy deployment of his roster. The Yankees pulled even with a homer of their own in the bottom of the first and, after two more blasts and some tidy work from their relief pitchers, won 8 to 4. Luis Severino, the 23-year-old flamethrower, gave up two home runs to the first four Minnesota Twins he faced, and the manager Joe Girardi removed him just one out into the game-a decision he’d never have made in August. In Tuesday night’s American League Wild Card contest, the New York Yankees fell behind in a hurry. ![]() ![]() Viewed from a standpoint of competitive integrity, it has undeniable flaws a lone game is a sample size that even the most forgiving statistician would call insignificant, hardly a fair basis by which to judge World Series hopefuls. ![]() It is a departure, for good or ill, a dose of hurry-up excitement shot into a sport that usually prefers to take its time. What both sides agree on is the Wild Card’s essential difference from the normal rhythms of baseball. It’s like eating the cake before the meal.” “Not every postseason series will include a winner-take-all game,” Kepner wrote. Tyler Kepner, writing for The New York Times between Tuesday’s game and Wednesday’s, ranked it as “one of the league’s most inspired decisions.” The New Yorker’s Roger Angell called it “deplorable.” Traditionalists bemoan the reducing of a season’s worth of gains and falters to a single fluky set of nine innings, while adrenaline junkies love it for the same reason. The setup, in which the two non-division winners in each league’s bracket start things off with a one-game play-in, has no casual admirers it usually provokes absolute disdain or total admiration. Six years into its existence, Major League Baseball’s current Wild Card system still prompts plenty of chatter. ![]()
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