UTK Playoff Preview 2025
Wild Card Round
Before we start, something happened on Sunday that I have to address. Greg Amsinger is a terrific television host. I genuinely like watching him and when I’ve been on with him in the past, he’s great. He’s energetic, passionate, and willing to take big swings. But late on the final day of the season, with the Mets trailing 4–0 in the eighth inning, two outs, two men on, and Jeff McNeil at the plate, he made a statement that choked me: he said he didn’t want a home run. He wanted a base hit to “keep the rally going,” even with Francisco Alvarez waiting on deck. Down four runs, on the road, with the season closing in, he said a three-run homer would be a rally killer.
The math disagrees, violently. A single there moves the Mets win probability up a few points. A three-run homer? It jumps it by nearly twenty. Put differently, the base hit nibbles at the deficit while the homer smashes it down to one. In the eighth inning with only four outs left to play with, outs are your oxygen. A single breath doesn’t buy much time. Three runs in a swing changes everything. It brings the tying run to the plate in the very next at-bat and rewrites the entire leverage map.
That’s not a knock on Amsinger. His instincts are rooted in the classic baseball broadcast tropes like momentum, rallies, and keeping the line moving. It’s how generations of fans were trained to think about offense, all the way down to Bugs Bunny. A rally is exciting. Stringing hits together is relatable. Two-out RBI seem harder. Everyone remembers that inning where five singles turned into a crooked number, but the modern game is built differently. Offenses are designed to slug, not to peck. Pitchers are too good, relievers too specialized, and bullpens too deep to count on stacking base hits when trailing late, even against the Marlins where some guy named Calvin Faucher was pumping 96. You need damage.
Should MLB Network* allow its hosts to make these kinds of arguments on the biggest day of the year? There are two sides to it. On the critical side, this is Major League Baseball’s own network. When the stakes are highest and the eyes are widest, credibility matters. Viewers should, ideally, leave understanding more, including why a home run is worth exponentially more than a single, not confused by the idea that three runs at once somehow “kills momentum.” If the sport’s own flagship voice is undercutting its most basic truth - that scoring runs is the only way back - it feels like a disservice.
On the forgiving side, this is television. It’s supposed to feel alive, not like a Fangraphs webinar. Amsinger wasn’t drawing up an actuarial table. He was creating tension, heightening the idea that baseball is about moments, not math. There’s even a kernel of nuance to his point: maybe he was thinking about approach, that McNeil’s job isn’t to chase power he doesn’t have, but to put the ball in play and let Alvarez swing with runners still on base. That’s a different conversation, one about player profiles and matchups, but he never said that.
The best version of this is balance. Let Amsinger lean into the drama, but put a number on the screen. Don’t just have a player and a pitcher, have a numbers guy. (Yes, there are some you could put on TV. And yes, I’ve seen Dan Plesac take advanced metrics and make a good segment out of them when he used PitchAI on Marquee.) Show the fans that the homer spikes win expectancy and explain why. Use the energy, but ground it in reality. On the most dramatic day of the season, baseball deserves both the roar and the reason. That’s how you serve the game and the audience. Brian Kenny and his alligator boots are right there and Joe Sheehan is just across the river! On what could be the biggest day with the biggest drama, throw a cast of thousands and let it play out the same way the day does.
Now, let’s look at each of the teams that will be in the Wild Card round, now that we know. The four teams with the bye? We’ll pick them up ahead of next round while they rest, or rust … wait a minute, we know the answer to that as well and the answer is rest. See how easy that is, though I’m admittedly not live.
This playoff preview is only available to paid subscribers. Please consider subscribing to support the work I do here.