In 2022, Major League Baseball ended a preseason lockout with its players. Part of the agreement was to expand the number of teams in the playoffs. And, to make sure that the season would not go on too long, Major League Baseball got rid of tiebreaker playoff games between teams that finished with the same record and needed to determine who was entitled to a particular playoff spot.
In its place, five tiebreaking criteria were set up:
Head to head record during the year. This is actually best winning percentage since teams could be in different divisions and play a different number of games.
Record within your own division. It doesn’t matter if the teams are in different divisions, you still look at the divisional record. Every team plays 52 intradivisional games now.
Record in games outside your division, but within your league. This is a set of 64 games.
Record in the last half of intraleague games. Since there are 116 intraleague games, you check the last 58.
And if teams are still tied, you go sudden death as it were game by game heading backwards until one team has a W and the other has an L. Unless the tied teams played ALL of their game in the last half, it’s hard to get past this step.
From my perspective, this doesn’t seem overly complicated. But, it’s almost always described in such a way. Since all teams play 13 games against division opponents, most ties will be broken on the first step since, and, this is breaking news, 13 is an odd number. Also, with most tiebreakers if there are more than two teams tied, once you find out who is in first place, you toss that team out and figure out the placement again with the remaining teams.1
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The demise of the tiebreaker playoff game (or games as it was in 1946, 1951, 1959, 1962, and 2018) does take away some of baseball’s most iconic moments. The Shot Heard ‘Round the World would not have happened in 1951 as the Dodgers won the season series 13-9. Bucky Dent would be little remembered because the Yankees would have already won the 1978 AL East thanks to an 8-7 record in regular season play.2
Barring some unusual circumstances, the last tiebreaker games in Major League Baseball came in the only doubleheader of tiebreakers on October 1, 2018. The Brewers and Cubs tied for the NL Central and the Dodgers and Rockies tied for the NL West. The tiebreaker games determined who would be the division champ and who would play in the wild card game. The Brewers beat the Cubs 3-1 and the Dodgers beat the Rockies, 5-2.
In 2019, there were no ties. The 2020 COVID season had one tie and it was just for seeing. Cleveland and Chicago both finished 35-25, one game behind Minnesota. Cleveland was awarded second place because of their 8-2 record against Chicago. In 2021, there was one tie but it was for the two AL wild card spots and both New York and Boston had already qualified. And the game was played in Boston because of the Sox 10-9 series record against New York.
The 2022 season saw an extra team in each league making the playoffs, making a tie more likely. And there was one as Atlanta passed the Mets on the second to last day of the season and then ended up with identical 101-61 records. Atlanta was awarded first place and a first round by virtue of a 10-9 season series win. Not that it mattered much as the Mets lost their series to San Diego, and Atlanta rested up and lost its series to Philadelphia.
Right now, the World Baseball Classic is being played and it has the dreaded “complicated set of tiebreakers.”3 And well, it’s a bit more complicated than the MLB tiebreakers, but they also make sense.
To put teams in order in group play (which is just four games), the first tiebreaker is head to head record. And if there are just two teams tied, then it’s over. But when three or more teams are tied, or, in the case of one group, all five teams finished with the same record, there was more math involved.
Step two has the misfortune of using the word “quotient” to describe it, even though the number produced is indeed a quotient. In particular, it’s the quotient of runs allowed divided by the number of defensive outs recorded in games between tied teams. It sounds complex but it just a reflection of how many runs a team allowed taking into account how many innings they had to play. International play has a mercy rule (“run rule” is the preferred term) so not all games go the full nine innings. If that ended in a tie, (which is highly unlikely that all teams played games of equal length with identical scores), the next tiebreaker would be the same quotient except the dividend is changed to earned runs. The divisor remains the same, outs recorded on defense. After that, comes batting average in a games among tied games. And, the final tiebreaker would be a random draw.
In the case of the five way tie in Pool A in the World Baseball Classic, Cuba ended with a .139 quotient (low quotient wins in this situation), Italy was at .157. The Dutch missed out on making the quarterfinals at .186. The Netherlands won their first two games, giving up just three runs, followed up by two losses in which they gave up 16 runs and they batted first in the two losses and lost out on six outs.
Since the World Baseball Classic is run over such a short period, they do not have time for tiebreaker games. And in the case of Group A, a five-way tiebreaker would take 2-3 days to play out to determine where everyone falls. Also, it’s the World Baseball Classic and people aren’t going to be that upset. They’ll be upset that Edwin Diaz got hurt, but not about a five-way tie in an international baseball tournament played in Taiwan.
Although in 2017, the WBC organizers messed up the math in a Pool D tiebreaker and told Mexico that it had advanced to the quarterfinals when they had not. Mexico was displeased. But really people, Google Sheets is free. You can make a spreadsheet. Find the person in the office who knows how to make one and have them made up ahead of time. It is not hard.
Coming up in the next post, do other sports have a “series of complicated tiebreakers?” Of course they do! And I will argue that there is no such thing as a complicated tiebreaker. There are just uncomplicated people figuring them out.
The closest baseball ever came to three way tie was in 1995 in the AL when the Angels and Mariners tied at 78-66 and the Yankees were in a wild card spot at 79-65. However, under the rules at the time, even if Seattle, Anaheim, and New York had finished with the same record, the Yankees would have been given the wild card spot and the teams in the same divsion would have played a tiebreaker. The 1915 Federal League had three teams end up within ½ game of each other for first place as it opted not to make up postponed games.
In 1946, the Cardinals won the regular season series over the Dodgers 14-8. in 1959, the Dodgers won the season series against Milwaukee. In 1948 and 1962, the tied teams split their season series. (Boston vs Cleveland, Dodgers vs Giants). I’m skipping the other tiebreaker games in divisional play.
Most people view the “complicated sets of tiebreakers” like getting “a painful series of injections in your stomach” if you’re exposed to rabies. They don’t do that for rabies anymore and haven’t for most of us in our own lifetime. You get 4-5 shots in your arm over two weeks. All of which is better than getting rabies, which is a pretty awful thing to experience.