The Official Baseball Rules do not contain the words “postseason” or “playoff”; there are no special provisions for October. The Rules are the same. The rules, however, are not. There are different incentives, higher stakes, more room for extreme strategy. The game’s relationship with time is warped. If the regular season is spent managing against tomorrow—against the resources and rest that must be saved and leveraged, for the next day and next week and next month—the postseason is spent managing for tomorrow. Which is, at least partially, how baseball ended up here:
Entering the World Series, relievers had pitched exactly half of the innings in this year’s postseason.