Major League Baseball’s postseason is about to get rolling fast and furious.
It’s time for the Division Series — the ALDS and NLDS.
The New York Yankees will take on the Tampa Bay Rays.
The Cleveland Guardians meet a division foe as well, the Chicago White Sox.
In the NL, it’s the Los Angeles Dodgers up against the Atlanta Braves, and the Milwaukee Brewers against the San Diego Padres.
Those all promise to be thrilling series with big names and high drama.
They just aren’t starting when it maybe would’ve been most ideal for MLB to start the games.
Are There MLB Games Tonight?
There are no MLB games on Friday, Oct. 2.
The ALDS and NLDS schedules both begin on Saturday.
It’s a curious choice that looks worse when you consider the rest of the sports calendar.
It’s a limited sports slate on Friday night, just a few college football games and a handful of NHL contests.
Saturday, when the series actually begin, is filled with college football, and then the action continues Sunday while overlapping with the NFL.
It sure feels like a big missed viewership opportunity.
Why Are There No MLB Games Tonight?
There aren’t any MLB games on Friday night because of how the playoff schedule is now set up with the best-of-three Wild Card Round.
The regular season ends on a Sunday, and that’s almost certainly never going to change.
That means the earliest you can begin the next round is on a Tuesday, and that’s what MLB did — all four Wild Card Series began on Tuesday.
They were scheduled for three consecutive days, so any series that went three games would end on Thursday.
MLB couldn’t really schedule the next round on a Friday for the team ending on a Thursday.
Now this year, three of the four Wild Card Series ended on Wednesday, but MLB doesn’t really have a means of adjusting to that on the fly.
The ideal scenario would somehow feature matchups that were already established, and not first-round bye teams waiting to play teams that had games in the middle of the week.
Say, for example, when five teams got in for each league. You could then have the 4- and 5-seeds play a series, have the 1-seed awaiting that winner, but have the 2- and 3-seeds straight into the Division Series without having to wait for anyone. That’d be an ideal game to start on a Friday night.
MLB won’t be subtracting teams from the playoffs anytime soon, though.
MLB Playoff Schedule: ALDS, NLDS Game 1s
These are the four games scheduled on Saturday, in Eastern Time:
- Chicago White Sox at Cleveland Guardians (1 p.m.)
- Atlanta Braves at Los Angeles Dodgers (4 p.m.)
- New York Yankees at Tampa Bay Rays (6:30 p.m.)
- San Diego Padres at Milwaukee Brewers (8:30 p.m.)
Both NLDS Game 2s are scheduled for Sunday, but the ALDS Game 2s aren’t until Monday.
MLB Games Tonight: What To Know About Playoff Schedule