Checking Our Wild Card Numbers: Three Favorites Advanced. Houston Went Home.
BBMI favored all four hosts. The Braves, Yankees and Padres moved on, while the White Sox swept our co-favorite Astros. Here’s how the round played out.
Braves 57%
Astros 61%
Yankees 61%
Padres 55%
The Yankees scored 18 runs against Boston. San Diego held the Cubs to one. Atlanta needed a third game and four outs from Chris Sale out of the bullpen. Houston never got to a third game.
Our Wild Card preview gave every home team a better-than-even chance of advancing: Astros 61%, Yankees 61%, Braves 57% and Padres 55%. Three advanced. The White Sox supplied the upset.
Phillies at Braves
White Sox at Astros
Red Sox at Yankees
Cubs at Padres
Houston was the miss
Houston shared our highest series probability with the Yankees. The Astros were also our most debatable favorite: an 81-81 club that had been outscored during the regular season, facing an 84-win White Sox team.
Chicago won the opener 6-3, then knocked Hunter Brown out after two outs in Game 2. Four first-inning runs put Houston in trouble immediately. The Astros fought back to within 4-3, but Chase Meidroth’s three-run homer in the sixth ended that comeback. The 7-3 win gave the White Sox their first postseason series victory since 2005, when they also swept Houston.
White Sox6Astros3We favored Houston partly because of the projected pitching matchups. Brown’s early exit is therefore something to examine when reviewing the forecast, alongside the defensive mistakes that helped Chicago build its lead.
A 61% projection still gives the opponent a 39% chance of advancing. That makes a Houston loss entirely plausible. We still need to examine why we favored Houston. We picked the wrong side of this series, and the sweep stays on the record.
New York and San Diego left little doubt
The Yankees won 9-0 and 9-2 despite Aaron Judge’s absence. Cam Schlittler struck out 10 in the opener, when Ben Rice hit two home runs and drove in six. Max Fried followed with six strong innings in Game 2, and Cody Bellinger’s three-run homer helped finish Boston off.
Our 61% leaned New York. The Yankees made the series look much less competitive than that. Two decisive wins don’t establish that the pre-series number should have been higher, but they certainly made this the easiest of our four picks to watch.
San Diego was our narrowest favorite at 55%. Michael King promptly threw seven scoreless innings in an 8-0 opener. In Game 2, Gavin Sheets delivered a pinch-hit, two-run homer, and the Padres’ bullpen supplied 5⅔ scoreless innings to finish a 4-1 win. The Cubs scored once in two games.
Chicago led the majors with 850 runs during the regular season, then managed one against San Diego. Pete Crow-Armstrong and Alex Bregman went a combined 0-for-15. The Cubs’ biggest strength never showed up at Petco Park.
Atlanta needed three games and its ace out of the bullpen
The Braves were our 57% series favorite, but Philadelphia pushed them to Thursday. Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber homered in the eighth inning of Game 2, and Alec Bohm’s tenth-inning homer gave the Phillies a 4-3 win.
Atlanta answered with three home runs in the decider. Michael Harris II hit a three-run shot in the first, Ozzie Albies added a two-run homer, and Matt Olson went deep in the seventh. Ray Kerr opened with 3⅓ scoreless innings, and Sale returned from his Game 1 start to record the final four outs of a 6-2 win.
That pitching plan matters to our review. The preview listed Grant Holmes as Atlanta’s reported Game 3 starter. He instead followed Kerr, and Sale helped close the series. We correctly favored Atlanta, but the game was not played under exactly the pitching assumptions we published.
Chicago’s pitching order changed, too. Our preview projected Clay Holmes for Game 2, but the Cubs went with Kevin Gausman. San Diego advanced as forecast, although that matchup differed from the one behind our original number.
What 3-1 tells us
Adding our four series probabilities gives an expected total of 2.33 favorite wins. We got three. That is a good result, comfortably within the range those probabilities allow.
The round also ended faster than expected. Our published numbers put each series at roughly a 50% chance of reaching Game 3. We expected about two deciding games and got one. Assuming the series were independent, one or fewer deciding games had about a 32% chance of happening. Three sweeps were no statistical shock.
There were nine games and four series decisions. That is enough to record how the picks performed, but far too little to establish whether our probabilities were well calibrated. That takes many more forecasts and results.
We finished the round 3-1 on series favorites. We’ll review those assumptions as we prepare for the Division Series. The original numbers remain available beside the results, and the broader record remains on our Prediction Record.
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