One of the changes in the first year of Major League Baseball's new, expanded playoff format is that the best regular-season teams have more rest before they begin postseason play.

The No. 1 and No. 2 seeds in each league bypassed the wild-card round, which was expanded from a single-game, play-in affair to a best-of-three series. This gave the top two seeds in the AL and NL a five-day break before the division series beginning Tuesday.

There are great advantages to a first-round bye. In addition to avoiding first-round elimination, relievers have more time to recover and teams can set fully rested starting rotations. But in a sport where timing and rhythm seem so important, these teams also have had their longest layoffs from competition since the All-Star break (which affects every team equally). Their opponents, meanwhile, each enter on the heels of a series victory.

We were curious whether there was a benefit or disadvantage to having this extra time off in the postseason. theScore examined Retrosheet data dating back to 1995, the beginning of the wild-card era, to identify all the teams that had four or more days of rest in the postseason.

We found 88 instances overall, but many of them involved two rested teams playing each other. For example, both League Championship Series in 2018 involved teams with four or more days' rest: The Dodgers and Brewers had four days between series, and the Red Sox and Astros had five days each.

So we pared it down to the 40 series where only one team had four or more days of rest, which is the same circumstance the Dodgers, Braves, Astros, and Yankees find themselves in this week.

We might expect any such rest – or rust – issues to be most apparent in the first game back after a layoff (although rested teams generally ought to be able to use their best starting pitching option in Game 1).

In the 40 series, the teams with at least four days of rest went 19-21 in Game 1s, and they only won 17 of the 40 series. Of the 23 series where the more rested team lost, 13 of those teams lost to an opponent with a worse regular-season record.

Extra rest was less likely to hinder teams that had a significant regular-season advantage in the matchup, however. Teams that had won at least 10 games more than their opponent were 10-1 in Game 1s and 8-3 in the series overall.

The interesting results come from teams that were within nine games of each other in the regular season. The better-rested teams were 8-19 in Game 1s and 7-20 in the overall series results. The teams from that group that played Game 1 at home went 4-11 and won just five of the 15 series.