Massive Tie Tease

The NL Wild Card race looks very good right now for a massive tie. The five teams involved do not play each other much, which means that the teams can all put together very high winning percentages the rest of the way and still get a tie. In other words, there is a large sample space available for a tie.

The following would result in at least a five-way tie for the two NL Wild Card slots (including the Giants loss to the Cubs Friday afternoon):

Team	Record for Tie
Giants	23-5
Cardinals	25-5
Mets	26-2
Pirates	28-3
Marlins	27-1

This assumes the Marlins take two out of the three games they play against the Mets, the Pirates sweep their three games against the Cardinals, and the Cardinals sweep four games against the Giants. That would make all four teams 95-67. Note that the Dodgers could lose three to Miami and four of the six games against San Francisco and still win the division outright, as 22-7 gets them to 96 wins. The Dodgers going 21-8 under this scenario would create a six-way tie for the NL West and both wild card slots.

The Pirates finish the season with three against the Cardinals, so they would need to be an odd number of games apart for a tie to be possible. Likewise with the Giants and Dodgers, if you really want to consider the bigger tie.

The MLB tie breaker rules do not address five-way ties. In a five-way tie for the two slots, I assume the teams would be seeded 1-5, and the two lowest seeds would play a play-in game. The four teams remaining would each play a game, and the two winners would be the wild card teams, and then play the wild card game.

In the six-team tie, on day one I would have the two division leaders play for the division title, and the two lower seeds of the remaining four conduct a play-in game. The winner of the play-in game and the loser of the division game, along with the two bye teams, would play games the next day, and the two winners would be the wild card teams. What I don’t like about this is that a team that tied for a division win has to play an extra game. The television schedule is such, however, that MLB will want to settle break the ties as quickly as possible.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2cmkIc2