The last week of the regular season isn’t quite as fun as the first week of the playoffs, but it’s close. Everyone’s scoreboard-watching, doing back-of-the-napkin math to track who can clinch when and under what circumstances, and also wondering how on Earth the Mariners are still technically alive. It’s the time of year when Jay Jaffe turns a warm, rich copper color and transforms into a glowing orb.
Since 2022, the last week of the season has been a little less interesting. Up until that point (with one or two exceptions), MLB had taken a unique view toward ties in the standings. Where other leagues in other sports would settle a deadlock by going down a list of tiebreakers, MLB teams would settle ties on the field, with a (usually one-game, sometimes three-game) playoff before the actual playoffs.
For generations, this system made sense. In a league with either two or four divisions and only one or two playoff rounds, the stakes were incredibly high, and time was abundant. And it produced some incredible moments: the Bucky Dent homer, the Giants soaking the infield to slow down Maury Wills, the Matt Holliday slide… oh, and the Shot Heard ‘Round the World, probably the most famous non-World Series play in baseball history.
But the postseason is expanding, and while global climate change will ultimately make places like Boston and Chicago temperate enough for playoff baseball in mid-November, we’re not there yet. (To say nothing of the occasional September hurricane that forces two teams to play a day-after-the-season doubleheader to settle the playoff picture.) So when MLB expanded the postseason temporarily in 2020, and then permanently in 2022, it went the way of the other leagues and instituted a series of tiebreakers.
Here they are:
1) Head-to-head record
2) Intradivision record
3) Interdivision record
4) Record in intraleague games in the last half of the season
5) Record in intraleague games in the last half of the season plus one game, and so on and so forth
Most tiebreaker rules are a little arcane. Nobody ever expects to get past the first one or two, and anything beyond that falls under the category of “in case of emergency.” The FIFA World Cup’s list of tiebreakers for group stage games includes a seemingly inexhaustible series of criteria involving goalscoring and team discipline, ending in the tantalizing-but-as-yet-unused “Drawing of Lots.”
Major League Baseball, to my immense disappointment, does not have a provision for drawing lots. But even if it did, we wouldn’t have seen it used. We’ve had three full postseasons — 2020, 2022, and 2023 — without a provision for a tiebreaker game. In those three seasons, we’ve had six ties broken by tiebreakers. (Plus the Marlins and Reds in 2020, but Miami was locked into the no. 6 seed and Cincinnati the no. 7 seed because of the way playoff spots were apportioned that year.)
Some of these tiebreaker results are trivial. Like, last year, the Marlins and Diamondbacks finished with the same record, and by virtue of Miami winning the season series, 4-2, the Marlins had the no. 5 seed instead of the no. 6 seed. I love tiebreaker games as much as anyone, but it would’ve been an enormous waste of everyone’s time to force these teams to travel to settle that score.
But in each of the past two seasons, we’ve had a division title decided by a tiebreaker: Astros vs. Rangers last year, Braves vs. Mets in 2022. And in both of those cases, the division title didn’t just mean a more favorable first-round matchup, it meant a bye out of the first round altogether. And in 2020, both the Brewers and Giants finished 29-31, but the Brewers had a better record against NL Central opponents than the Giants did against the NL West, so Milwaukee went to the playoffs and the Giants went home.
Remember, the Brewers and Giants didn’t play each other in 2020 — because of the weird travel-restricted schedule, teams played only within their own divisions and the corresponding division in the opposite league. (I guess COVID can survive a change in longitude but not a change in latitude, or something.) So without a head-to-head tiebreaker available, the Giants got left out of the playoffs for going 18-22 against a brutal NL West schedule that included the two best teams in the National League.
The Brewers, by contrast, went an impressive 19-21 against an NL Central crop that was mediocre at the top and polluted at the bottom by a Pirates club that finished with the worst winning percentage in the NL by 100 points. (Five of Pittsburgh’s 19 wins on the season game against Milwaukee.)
I suppose there were greater injustices and crises on everyone’s mind at the time, and it’s hard to have too much sympathy with a team that couldn’t eke out a .500 record, but that’s an all-time bad beat. And when I’m dictator of the world, it will never happen again.
I like head-to-head record as a first tiebreaker. It’s direct, it’s simple, it’s easy to track, and it’s something over which both teams have agency. Plus it gives games between division rivals a little extra spice, knowing a result in May could make the difference between getting a bye and playing through the Wild Card round. (Not that, like, a Rangers-Astros game or a Dodgers-Padres game needs any more spice.)
There are tournament formats where group stage record is used in lieu of a playoff matchup. You all remember the Miracle on Ice? The first level of “Well, actually,” about that game is that it wasn’t the gold medal game. The U.S. needed to beat Finland two days later to secure the gold medal.
The second level of “well, actually,” is that there was not actually a gold medal game as such in that tournament. The 12 entrants were split into two groups of six, which played a round robin format. The two best teams from each group advanced to the medal round, where everyone played the two teams from the other group, but did not get a rematch with the other team from its own group. So Team USA topped the medal round standings by beating the Soviet Union and Finland, and by getting credit for a tie against Sweden on the very first day of the competition.
Just as the group stage matchup between the U.S. and Sweden counted retroactively as a medal round game, the play-in game has already taken place, with head-to-head record serving as a de facto Game 163.
And if it’s good enough for Herb Brooks, it’s good enough for me.
But after head-to-head record, I’d rip the format up.
Intradivision record makes some degree of sense as a tiebreaker for teams within the same division, but for teams from different divisions? It’s madness. Absolute rubber-chicken-toting silliness from a league that, for its many faults, usually puts a lot of thought into its schedule and playoff format.
What do I want as a second tiebreaker? Run differential. After that? Drawing of lots.
For two reasons. First, run differential is broadly instructive as a measure of team quality. Runs — either runs scored or runs prevented — are further up the causal chain than wins and losses. As such, they’re the most common expression of player value. Weighted runs created, defensive runs saved, earned run average, and so on. Because runs are divorced from game context, we commonly use run differential — expressed as Pythagorean record, or one of its cousins — as a check on whether a team is as good or as bad as its record suggests. Rewarding a team with a better run differential would reward the better team, period, and isn’t that what we want from a playoff format?
The second reason is normative. In major international rugby competitions — the World Cup, Six Nations, and so forth — teams are awarded standings points, like in soccer and hockey, for victories and draws. In rugby, it’s four points for a win and two for a draw. But teams can also earn bonus points, independent of the game result, in one of two ways: Scoring four tries (the rugby equivalent of a touchdown), or by losing by a margin of seven or fewer points.
These bonus points incentivize teams to play more attacking, higher-scoring rugby. In the language of gridiron football (I’m sorry, you hard-drinking, cauliflower-eared rugby nuts, I’m just trying to make this legible to my audience), teams have something to gain by trying to score touchdowns instead of kicking field goals. It also gives a losing team something to play for, and rewards teams for keeping the score close.
By making run differential salient to the playoff picture, we’d incentivize teams to keep pushing for offense when they’re ahead and to stay in the fight while they’re behind. Imagine you’re at a major league game. It’s the bottom of the eighth inning, the score is 12-2, it’s 10:15 p.m. on a Wednesday, you’ve got to be up for work in eight hours, your kids are cranky and fidgety, and Ildemaro Vargas is warming up on the mound.
At that point, not a soul in the stadium — fans, players, umpires, hot dog vendors — cares that much whether the final score ends up 20-2 or 12-6. The only people who’ll stay to the end, rather than trying to beat the traffic, are the absolute sicko diehards.
But what if that final score, 20-2 or 12-6, could determine a playoff berth, or possession of a first-round bye? It would disincentivize managers from packing it in and throwing out a human white flag: a position player, or a Quad-A homunculus with a slider but no command, or Drew Smyly. What is currently a giant neon sign that reads, “TURN THE TV OFF AND GO TO BED!” would (at least theoretically) have stakes.
It’d certainly be like Mardi Gras for sports talk radio concern trolls. Now, if a team loses by 10 runs, you can bark about it being a disgrace or showing a lack of fight, but the truth is most of the players involved will have forgotten about it by the start of the next game. But if run differential mattered, there’d be a tangible penalty for getting played off the field.
At least you could talk yourself into it. Altering the second tiebreaker would not have made a difference in any of the situations in which the teams involved played each other. In 2020, it would have reversed the battle between the A’s and Twins for the no. 2 seed in the AL, and elevated the Giants over the Brewers for the no. 8 seed in the NL. So… it would’ve reversed the order of the Astros’ first two playoff opponents and given the Dodgers a different team to beat half to death in the first round.
But the fact that a run differential tiebreaker wouldn’t have changed history that much is a point in its favor. It’s the ideal baseball reform, because it’s noisy but it does nothing. It’s something meaty to debate, to offend either the progressives or the purists (I truly have no idea which of the two groups this would annoy, but someone would toss a hissy fit), while having only a negligible impact on the playoff picture.
Anything is better than intradivision record.
