By Sam Bush
Jayson Stark used to write for the Inky, and he now cover the major leagues for The Athletic:
The Phillies, Blue Jays and Rays were all buyers.
They, too, were looking at double-digit mountains to climb in their division.
But with three wild-card spots available in each league, that was all the motivation they needed to say: If we can just get in, anything can happen.
The best-of-three first round changed teams’ thinking. The old one-and-done wild-card game made for epic baseball theater. What it didn’t make for was epic deadline theater.
We had a decade’s worth of evidence that modern front offices now think so scientifically, they had long ago made the calculation that it was almost never worth paying those steep deadline prices — not if all you got out of it was a one-game coin flip to decide the fate of your whole season.
But now that those wild cards get to play a best-of-three series, the thinking of many teams has clearly changed. The Phillies (Noah Syndergaard) and Cardinals (Jordan Montgomery, José Quintana) are just two of the clubs that traded for back-of-the-rotation starters who, potentially, could pitch one of those three games.
