Baseball's Biggest Day, Times Four
Today marks the start of the 2026 MLB postseason, with all four best-of-three Wild Card series kicking off in sequence across NBC, Peacock, and NBCSN: Phillies-Braves at 2 p.m. ET, White Sox-Astros at 5 p.m., Red Sox-Yankees at 8 p.m., and Cubs-Padres at 10 p.m. It's the first time in a generation that NBC has carried postseason baseball, and the network is opening with a full day of it.
A Rivalry Renewed, A City Divided
The night's marquee matchup is Red Sox-Yankees, a Wild Card rematch of last year's series and baseball's most storied rivalry regardless of the round. New York enters banged up: reigning AL MVP Aaron Judge is officially expected to miss the series with a moderate calf strain, though he's spent the days leading up to Game 1 pushing hard to be activated, taking live batting practice and calling himself "excited to get on the field." Elsewhere, the Phillies and Braves renew their 2023 NLDS rivalry, while the Astros host a White Sox team that became the first in MLB history to reach the postseason immediately following back-to-back 100-loss seasons.
The night's deepest historical thread, though, belongs to Chicago. With the Cubs facing the Padres and the White Sox facing the Astros, this marks just the fourth time in franchise history that both Chicago teams have reached the postseason in the same year — following 1906, 2008, and 2020. The 1906 meeting remains the standard by which any future all-Chicago October would be measured: that year, the Cubs and White Sox skipped straight to the World Series itself, with the White Sox upsetting a Cubs team that had posted one of the greatest regular-season records in baseball history. Today's Cubs enter with their own compelling story: center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong, the likely National League MVP, became just the seventh player in major league history to record 40 home runs and 40 stolen bases in the same season. The Dodgers and Brewers, meanwhile, earned first-round byes as division champions and won't begin their postseason until the Division Series.
Wild Card day has become its own kind of baseball holiday in recent years, compressing an entire October's worth of anxiety into one packed, overlapping broadcast schedule. This year's version carries a bit more weight than most: a century-old rivalry renewed, a historically bad team's improbable turnaround, and a Chicago storyline that has now happened only four times since baseball's postseason began keeping track. Whatever happens across today's four series, by Thursday night the field for October will look very different than it does right now.