After a long regular season, MLB's best teams are ready to do battle in the postseason, all for a chance to play in baseball's most famous game – the World Series.
The MLB postseason will begin in September with the Wild Card Round. Initially introduced in 2012, the Wild Card Round was traditionally a single elimination game between the 2 teams in each league (American League and National League) with the next-best records after the 3 division winners. After a brief move away from this system in the Covid-hit season of 2020, MLB officially overhauled the Wild Card Round for the 2022 season onwards, expanding the number of annual playoff teams from 10 to 12.
From 2022 onwards, 3, rather than 2, "best-of-the-rest" teams from each league earn their way into the MLB postseason as wild cards. The Wild Card Round has also been changed from a single elimination game to a best-of-3 series, with the first team to win 2 games advancing to the Division Series.
Seeds #1 and #2 in each league earn a bye for this round, but all other qualified teams are in action, with seed #3 playing seed #6, and seed #4 facing seed #5. In all Wild Card games, the higher-seeded team has home advantage for the entire series.
