Starting at high noon and ending past midnight, a day of playoff baseball like none before it

Sixteen teams, eight games — half of them of the elimination variety — and some 13 or so hours of wall-to-wall baseball. At its best, it was pure, channel-flipping madness — the sport’s version of a jam-packed, coast-to-coast Saturday of college football or the opening week of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Instead of March Madness, it was Fall Frenzy.

In a pandemic-shortened season defined largely by what was lost — more than 1,500 regular season games, the in-person fan experience, Buster Posey — it was refreshing, for once, to revel in what was gained. Before MLB decided to cram six extra teams and as many as 22 extra games into its postseason, its busiest playoff slates on a given day featured four division series games.

You wouldn’t want to do this every year — and indeed, MLB has been firm in saying this year’s 16-team postseason is a one-year-only deal — but if you love baseball and if you had a remote control, a TV and many hours to kill, it was nirvana.

Games started every hour, more or less on the hour, from noon until 5 p.m. Eastern, and the last pitch wouldn’t come until well past midnight. At one point in the late afternoon, after the Toronto Blue Jays and Tampa Bay Rays got underway in St. Petersburg, Fla., five games were going on simultaneously — in the first, third, seventh, eighth and 12th innings — and the aggregate margin was just six runs.

And it wasn’t just your standard, everyday baseball — it was the good stuff. History seemed to be made at every turn in the early games. In Atlanta, where aces Max Fried and Trevor Bauer put on a brilliant pitchers’ duel, the Braves and Cincinnati Reds played the first game in postseason history to go past the 11th inning in a scoreless tie.

And then they went past the 12th and into the 13th, the game unwittingly demonstrating the appeal of the extra-inning rule MLB used during the regular season — with each half-inning in extras starting with a runner on second — but abandoned for the playoffs. Finally, in the 13th, MVP candidate Freddie Freeman singled over a five-man infield, and the Braves walked off the Reds, 1-0, to win Game 1.

In Minneapolis — where Twins rookie Alex Kirilloff became the third player in history to make his major league debut in the postseason and the first to do so from his team’s starting lineup — the Minnesota Twins fell to the Houston Astros and were swept out of the first round. Unfathomably, it was the Twins’ 18th straight loss in the postseason, a record not only for baseball but for all North American professional sports.

The Astros’ 3-1 win advanced them to an American League Division Series, which will be staged at Dodger Stadium — the same ballpark where the Astros clinched their disputed 2017 World Series title. For the Astros’ sake, it’s probably just as well those games won’t have fans in the stands.

“I know a lot of people are mad. I know a lot of people don’t want to see us here,” Astros shortstop Carlos Correa said on a video interview with reporters, taunting the team’s many haters. “But what are they going to say now? We’re a solid team. We played great baseball. We won a series on the road in Minnesota. So what are they going to say now?”

The Astros will face the winner of the series between the Chicago White Sox and Oakland Athletics, who will play a winner-take-all Game 3 on Thursday after the A’s survived a near-meltdown by their bullpen Wednesday afternoon — with left-hander Jake Diekman needing to bail out closer Liam Hendriks with the bases loaded and two outs in the ninth — and hung on for a 5-3 victory. The A’s had lost six straight postseason games before Wednesday.

“We know the numbers,” said Oakland starter Chris Bassitt, who tossed seven effective innings. “… It feels a little like the monkey’s off our backs.”

On the North Side of Chicago, the Miami Marlins’ charmed and charming turnaround — from the epicenter of MLB’s late-July coronavirus nightmare to the unlikeliest of September juggernauts — continued with a 5-1 victory over the Chicago Cubs. The Marlins, however, may have lost veteran Starling Marte, their everyday center fielder and No. 2 hitter, who suffered a broken finger after he was hit on the hand by a pitch in the ninth inning.

One of the oddities of this MLB season was the regionalized schedules, which helped keep the season alive amid the many scheduling nightmares it traversed but also meant seven of the eight first-round playoff series featured teams that, despite being in the same league, hadn’t played each other all year. And that, by extension, meant 15 of the 16 starting pitchers Wednesday were facing their opponent for the first time in 2020.

The exception was Blue Jays starter Hyun Jin Ryu, who had previously faced the Rays in July and August. And it was Ryu who turned in perhaps the day’s biggest dud, getting chased in the second inning as the Rays clinched the series and a berth in the division series with an 8-2 win.

It was possible Wednesday to be both grateful for the unprecedented bounty of baseball and uneasy about the prospect of bringing it back in future years, at least in its current form. The format, exhilarating as it is, leaves much to be desired, chiefly the depreciation of the regular season — an inevitability when more than half of baseball’s 30 teams qualify for the postseason and all 16 playoff teams face the same best-of-three test in the opening round.

Something seemed inherently unfair, for example, about a 36-24 Twins team being eliminated via a pair of losses to the 29-31 Astros, who, along with the Milwaukee Brewers, were the first teams in baseball history to make the playoffs with losing regular season records.

At nightfall on the East Coast, the spotlight was given over to the sport’s blue-blood network darlings: the New York Yankees in Cleveland to play the Indians — a game delayed by rain before the first pitch and again, following an ill-conceived decision to begin, just 14 minutes later — and the Los Angeles Dodgers hosting the Brewers, a game that would carry baseball’s longest, busiest day into the next day.

By that point, even the most grizzled, hard-line traditionalist had to admit: This was an amazing day of baseball. Let’s never do it again.

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