The best month of the sports calendar is October, and a big reason why starts Friday with the newly-minted best-of-three wild-card round for the MLB playoffs. We’ve gone from a one-game, winner-take-all format to a short series hosted by the higher-seeded team.
MLB (not surprisingly) made a pretty big faux pas with its new postseason format. Rather than re-seed after the wild-card round, the league went with a bracket-style format in which No. 1 plays the No. 4/5 winner and No. 2 plays the No. 3/6 winner. The No. 3 seed is automatically the division winner with the fewest wins, a team that will often be weaker than the top wild card, so that’s a bummer for the No. 1 seed.
In the National League, the Dodgers could very well get a 101-win Mets team in the NLDS as opposed to the winner of the Cardinals-Phillies series. Maybe the Padres can pull an upset, which would also be ripe with storylines after the Juan Soto acquisition, but the Mets are big favorites.
No. 5 San Diego Padres (+ 145) at No. 4 New York Mets (-175)
The Mets are priced anywhere from -165 to -175 (with DraftKings at -175) in a series they never should have been in. The Mets spent 175 days in first place this season but blew a 10.5-game lead and were swept by the reigning World Series champion Braves in the final week of the season to lose the NL East.