I hate the built-in extra day off. I�d like to see the first round played with either one or even zero days off, but while two is acceptable three is horrid. Eight days to play five games changes the nature of how the game is played all year. In this case the NL gets one series with the extra day off and Philly, having the best record, got first choice if they wanted it or not. Naturally they took it and will only have to use 3 pitchers even if it goes the whole 5 games. You're right: baseball is played on every Friday and Saturday all season long until the first round of the playoffs when one league has Friday off and the other has Saturday off. And, as you said, the benefit of a deeper rotation is lost. It's not even which days of the week the off days fall on, it's just that there's too many of them. The main culprit is, of course, TV. To hold four separate series without tweaking them the way they do would cause all four to be played on the same day at least once and MLB certainly doesn't want games overlapping each other to further dilute the viewership nor do the networks who pay all that money for the exclusivity factor. The other thing is that once they went to the Wild Card system there became the perceived need to not only give the higher ranked team home field advantage (as opposed to the previous random system) but also to never have the lower team have the advantage for even a moment during the series. That in turn led to one extra travel day in a five game series as they moved to a 2-2-1 split from the previous 2-3 At least they've yanked the extra day out of the LCS series this year and next season they've changed the starting and ending days of the season in order to begin the playoffs on a (in their opinion) more favorable time in the week.