Last year, one team crawled into the postseason, amid a stern social media mocking for failing to win enough in the last week of the regular season to avoid a first-round series. Because of these late-year struggles, this team faced an impossible gauntlet of road games.
And the Texas Rangers won them all, every single one, and this became the story of their 2023 championship, carved into the championship rings they'd win.
This week, another team's story will begin on a field, somewhere. Maybe it'll be in Cleveland or Los Angeles or in the Bronx or Philadelphia, where somebody figured out the confounding question of how to best deal with days off in a sport mostly played daily. Or maybe it will be in Baltimore or Houston or Milwaukee, where the road team won Game 1 in each of those wild-card matchups. With four teams on the brink of elimination and four vying to move on, there's plenty to watch in Game 2s on Wednesday.
With that in mind, here are the best matchups of the first round: