Every October the same argument comes back. The two best division winners in each league skip the Wild Card Series and wait four or five days while everyone else plays, and when one of them loses its Division Series the layoff gets the blame. The theory had its best years in 2022 and 2023, when five of the eight teams with a bye went out in their first series, the 111-win Los Angeles Dodgers among them.
So we tested it with the game model behind the Vertize MLB simulator on all 20 Division Series that teams with a bye have played, the 2026 postseason included.
How the MLB playoff format works
- Twelve teams make it, six per league: the three division winners and the three best records among the rest, the wild cards. Getting in has taken about 87 wins in a typical year.
- Division winners are seeded one to three by record, whatever that record is. Wild cards are seeded four to six.
- The top two seeds in each league get a bye straight into the Division Series.
- Seeds three to six play a best-of-three Wild Card Series, three against six and four against five, with every game at the higher seed's park.
- The Division Series is best-of-five, with the higher seed at home in games one, two and five. The League Championship Series and the World Series are best-of-seven, played 2-3-2.
- There are no tiebreaker games any more. Since 2022, ties are settled on paper, head-to-head record first and then record within the division.
The bye was designed as a reward, and whether it is one depends on a trade-off that is easy to state. A team with a bye cannot lose a short Wild Card Series, but it arrives at the Division Series without a game that counts for most of a week, against an opponent that has just won one. In 2026 the top seeds finished the regular season on Sunday, September 27 and did not play again until Saturday, October 3.
Rust or rest: what five Octobers say
We took every Division Series played by a team coming off a bye since the format began in 2022, 20 in all, and asked what each team's chance of advancing should have been. The model knows each side's run differential per game in that regular season, the small home edge and the 2-2-1 format, and nothing else: not the rest, not the rotation, not who was hurt.
The model expected 11.4 series wins from the 20 teams with a bye. They won 13. The bad years were real: the Atlanta Braves and the Dodgers each went out as clear favorites in both 2022 and 2023, and the 111-win Dodgers of 2022 lost 3-1 to the San Diego Padres with a 78 percent chance of advancing. But since 2024, 10 of the 12 have gone through.
If rust were real, it should show most in Game 1, the first game after the layoff, always played in the rested team's park. Teams with a bye won 12 of their 20 Game 1s, where the model expected 10.8.
Twenty series is still a small sample. By the model, teams of their strength would win 13 or more of them 31 percent of the time, so the surplus proves no hidden benefit of rest, and a genuine rust effect of a few percentage points could still hide inside it. What the data does rule out is the version you hear on broadcasts: that a week off turns a good team into an underdog.
The one split that looked bad is at the very top. Through 2025 the six 100-win teams with a bye had won a single Division Series between them, the 2022 Houston Astros, although the model made them 65 percent favorites on average, and MLB.com counted eight first-round exits among the ten teams to win 100 games this decade before the 2026 Brewers. In 2026 both of the year's 100-win teams, the Brewers and the Dodgers, won their series. Over five years the eight 100-win teams with a bye won three, against 5.2 expected, and the 12 below 100 wins won 10, against 6.3: too few series to tell a real effect from a streak.
MLB playoffs 2026: all four teams with a bye advanced
In the National League the byes went to the Brewers, at 103-59 the best record in baseball, and the Dodgers (100-62). The Padres swept the Chicago Cubs and the Braves beat the Philadelphia Phillies 2-1 in the Wild Card Series; then Milwaukee beat San Diego 3-1, Los Angeles beat Atlanta 3-1, and the Brewers swept the Dodgers in the NLCS.
The American League showed the format's quirk. The New York Yankees had the league's best run differential by a distance, +138, but the Tampa Bay Rays (98-64) won the East, so New York was the fourth seed and had to play a best-of-three. The second bye went to the Central champion, the Cleveland Guardians, eight wins behind New York at 85-77 and with a run differential of +11.
Both teams with a bye came through. The Yankees swept the Boston Red Sox and were then swept by the Rays. The Chicago White Sox, in the playoffs two years after a record 121-loss season, swept the 81-81 Astros and won the first two games in Cleveland, but the Guardians won the next three. Tampa Bay then beat Cleveland 4-2 in the ALCS.
By run differential the Rays and the Guardians were underdogs in their Division Series, at 45 percent each, and the Brewers (68 percent) and the Dodgers (59 percent) were favorites. The four were expected to win 2.2 series between them and won all four. Every series, game by game, is on our MLB playoff bracket.
How often teams with a bye win the pennant and the World Series
Over five Octobers the teams with a bye were a third of the field, 20 of the 60 playoff teams, and they took 13 of the 20 places in the League Championship Series, 6 of the 10 pennants and 3 of the 5 titles.
The reason is the arithmetic of short series. A team that beats a given opponent 60 percent of the time, a huge edge in baseball, is only a 65 percent favorite over three games, 68 percent over five and 71 percent over seven. Every round is a new chance for the better team to lose, and the bye is the only way to remove one.
| Postseason | Division Series won | Model expected | Pennants won | Champion |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 2 of 4 | 2.7 | 1 of 2 | Houston Astros, AL No. 1 |
| 2023 | 1 of 4 | 2.3 | 0 of 2 | Texas Rangers, AL No. 5 |
| 2024 | 3 of 4 | 2.2 | 2 of 2 | Los Angeles Dodgers, NL No. 1 |
| 2025 | 3 of 4 | 1.9 | 1 of 2 | Los Angeles Dodgers, NL No. 3 |
| 2026 | 4 of 4 | 2.2 | 2 of 2 | Milwaukee Brewers, NL No. 1 |
| Total | 13 of 20 | 11.4 | 6 of 10 | 3 of 5 had a bye |
The 2026 World Series was the second in five years between the two leagues' No. 1 seeds, after the Dodgers beat the Yankees in 2024. The Brewers won it in five games, clinching the first World Series title in franchise history with a 4-1 win at Tampa Bay on October 28. How often the best record in baseball goes on to win it all is in our study of MLB's best records, and every champion is in our list of World Series winners.
MLB playoff bye: frequently asked questions
Which teams get a bye in the MLB playoffs? The two division winners with the best records in each league. They go straight to the Division Series and skip the best-of-three Wild Card Series. In 2026 they were the Brewers and the Dodgers in the National League and the Rays and the Guardians in the American League.
Do MLB teams with a bye do worse in the playoffs? No. From 2022 to 2026 they won 13 of 20 Division Series, against a model expectation of 11.4 from their run differential, and 12 of their 20 Game 1s, the first game after the layoff.
Why can a team with a better record have to play the Wild Card Series? Because division winners are seeded first. A wild card with more wins than a division champion is still seeded fourth at best, as the 93-68 Yankees were in 2026 while the 85-77 Guardians had a bye, and only seeds one and two skip the first round.
Did a team with a bye win the 2026 World Series? Yes. The Milwaukee Brewers, the National League's No. 1 seed, beat the Tampa Bay Rays, the American League's No. 1 seed, 4-1. Three of the five champions since 2022 had a bye.
How this was built: each game's probability comes from the model in the Vertize MLB simulator. The home side starts 0.05 runs ahead, each run of season run differential per game is worth a run of expected margin, and the rest is randomness with a spread of 4.44 runs per game. Series chances are calculated exactly from those game probabilities in the 2-2-1 format. The test covers all 20 Division Series played by teams with a bye from 2022 to 2026, using each season's final regular-season standings and postseason results from the MLB Stats API. Injuries, rotations and rest are not in the model.