The 3 Most Compelling Storylines in the 2013 MLB Playoffs

This year’s Major League Baseball postseason should be one for the ages.

The Pittsburgh Pirates, yes the Pirates, are in for the first time since 1992. In fact, it is their first winning season since 1992. Not only that, but the Los Angeles Dodgers not only snatched the NL West from the San Francisco Giants dead body, but also put themselves in a position to take over where the New York Yankees left off—that is to say, they might be the team that tries to win by outspending everybody.

Then you have the Oakland Athletics and Tampa Bay Rays that play in shoddy baseball stadiums—one which literally fills with crap and the other that has power outages (Terrell Suggs probably thinks that’s Roger Goodell’s fault too)—that are located in small cities and happen to be just as competitive as the teams in New York, Boston and Los Angeles, not to mention Chicago…(Yeah, yeah we all know about the Cubs and White Sox).

Mariano Rivera is not going to walk off into the sunset—although short of that, he couldn’t have gone out in a better way—Stephen Strasburg isn’t going to have a chance at the playoffs post-shutdown this year, and the Miami Marlins, a year after building a new park with an LSD statue and spending out the ears for the first time in team history, are back to being Team Fire Sale.

Have no fear sports fans, the playoffs have plenty of storylines to follow anyways. The Pirates, Dodgers and both “Bay Area” teams—the one in the East Bay and the one in Tampa Bay—have the most compelling stories this year.

Can the Pirates Go from Rags to Riches?

Just about everyone who is going to be watching this year’s MLB playoffs knows that the Pirates got their first postseason win since 1992 when they beat the Cincinnati Reds in a one-game playoff on Tuesday.

It is also the team’s first winning season since 1992, meaning that the team had a losing record for 20 straight seasons. It was important for team management to put a winner on the field this year, not only because they are a historically significant franchise with an amazing taxpayer-funded ballpark, but also because they did not want Roberto Clemente’s number to be associated with their losing streak.

Led by Andrew McCutchen, who has signed long term with Pittsburgh, the Pirates have had success with a makeshift pitching staff, put enough talent around Cutch to have a productive lineup and made deadline moves for Justin Morneau and Marlon Byrd that helped them not only get into the playoffs, but also paid dividends in the single-elimination game.

Things could really get interesting if both Pittsburgh and Atlanta advance in the first round. The Bucs already defeated the Cincinnati Reds, the team that beat them in the NLCS back in 1990, but if the Braves and the Pirates meet in the NLCS this year, it will be a rematch of the 1991 and 1992 NLCS, which the Braves won in Game 7 both years.

The latter series was the heartbreaker of course, with former Pirate and native son Sid Bream scoring the go-ahead run to eliminate a Pittsburgh team that featured Barry Bonds and was managed by Jim Leyland.

Can the Pirates go from bottom feeding, luxury tax pillaging rapscallions to bona fide champions in one year? It would be quite the story, right?

Do the Big Bucks Translate into Playoff Success for the Dodgers?

While teams like the Tampa Bay Rays and Oakland Athletics find ways to exploit market inefficiencies and win with minimal payroll, and the rest of the league is looking for cost-effective players using strategies adapted from both organizations, the Los Angeles Dodgers are making their best effort to become the New York Yankees 2.0.

The current Bronx Bombers are cutting salary to get under the luxury threshold while continuing to dole out millions to overpaid players like Alex Rodriguez and Mark Teixeira, the Dodgers appear to be looking to be preying on the Yankees while they transition from the Derek Jeter-Mariano Rivera-Andy Pettitte era to the “mammoth expiring contracts” era.

The Dodgers famously traded for the Boston Red Sox’s flotsam and jetsam last year, only to see those players thrive in Southern California. Coupled with the talents of homegrown Matt Kemp, who will miss the playoffs due to injury, and imported Yasiel Puig and ace pitcher Clayton Kershaw, the likes of Adrian Gonzalez, Josh Beckett and the rest of the “Wings. Beer. Sports Video Games.” crowd that came over from Beantown look awfully good.

Even Hanley Ramirez, who left the Red Sox before the wings fiasco and was considered a clubhouse cancer with the Florida/Miami Marlins, has had success in blue.

There are still legitimate questions surrounding this team, however, that will be answered very soon: Can they take a playoff series, let alone win a championship, without Kemp? Are Puig’s fundamentals going to cost this team precious runs and outs in the playoffs? How will they celebrate without a pool to jump in? (I kid, I kid.)

And then the big one: In a league that is more balanced and has placed more emphasis on personnel moves, innovation and market strategy than free agent spending, can the Dodgers have sustained success just by having deep-pocketed ownership in a big city?

Will There be a Championship in a Bay Area?

Anybody that watched Moneyball knows that the 2002 Oakland A’s lost to the Minnesota Twins in the ALDS. The team also had been eliminated in the first round by the New York Yankees in the previous two seasons and would lose to the Boston Red Sox in the ALDS the next season.

They would sweep the Twins in the 2006 ALDS, finally reaching the second round, only to be swept by the Detroit Tigers in the ALCS.

So, in short, the Moneyball tactics get the A’s into the playoffs, but they have had very little success once they get there. Ultimately, Oakland GM Billy Beane has always dealt with flawed teams, and those flaws tend to get exposed in a five- or seven-game series.

In the “new” Moneyball era, if you will, the A’s have continued to find a way to win in their decrepit, tarp-laden ballpark by exploiting new market inefficiencies, using platoons and introducing other theories and methods to the game of baseball.

If you’re going to talk about small-market or underdog success stories this year, however, you have to include the Tampa Bay Rays.

The two teams are strikingly similar. They both have someone in management that is as, or more, famous than their players—Oakland GM Billy Beane and Tampa manager Joe Maddon. They both host games in second-rate facilities located in a small television market, and they both tend to sell off their best players as they near free agency.

The other common denominator, however, between the A’s and Rays is that they have had success getting into the playoffs, but have yet to win a championship recently.

Oakland tends to be more focused on platooning players—creating favorable matchups versus left-handed pitching, for example—while Tampa Bay has gone to great lengths to develop great pitchers.

The Tampa Bay Devil Rays and Arizona Diamondbacks joined the league in 1998. The D-Backs would go all-in right away and had considerable success right of the bat, winning 100 games in 1999 and beating the Yankees in the 2001 World Series while the Rays were, ahem, bottom feeders, locked up in the AL East cellar every year from 1998 to 2007 save for 2004…when they finished fourth.

In 2008 they dropped “Devil” from their name, won the AL East, and went to the World Series—only to lose to the Philadelphia Phillies in five games.

Tampa Bay hasn’t been back since, and despite winning the East again in 2010, they have yet to advance past the ALDS.

Can either of the two small-market teams advance past the first round? Or are their innovative strategies simply a ticket into the postseason and nothing else?

Conclusion

There are many reasons to watch the playoffs this year beyond what I just described, but these are the most compelling stories of the 2013 postseason.

No matter who wins, it should be a good ride for baseball fans throughout the country.

Tom Schreier covers Minnesota sports for Bleacher Report and is a contributor to Yahoo! Sports.

Follow @tschreier3