A first place tie between two playoff teams will no longer be decided by which team owns the best record:
Since 1995, head-to-head record has been used to determine first place if both teams are going to the postseason. But with the start of a one-game, winner-take-all wild-card round, both sides agreed the difference between first place and a wild-card berth is too important to decide with a formula and a tiebreaker game would be played.
The person spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because a deal hadn’t been finalized.
Excellent! The more baseball the better.
This whole one-game playoff idea gets worse and worse. We had an almost perfect playoff system (except for allowing the NL to not use the DH) and they had to fiddle with it.
I disagree with Joseph Finn, at least on the one game playoff. Why did they get rid of this in the first place? People still remember the one game playoff in 1978 between the Yankees and the Red Sox. And if your usual metric for deciding these things is whichever team wins the most games, then you should make sure that the division winner wins more games than its closest rival. This isn’t the NFL.
Now I understand that we are dealing with a situation where both teams are going to the postseason anyway. This actually touches on my objection to the wildcard system, that the regular season is simply better if a team has to win its division or it goes home. Having belatedly realized this, the people in charge of MLB are gradually devaluing the wildcard in favor of the division winners anyway, hence the reemergence of the one game playoff for the division winner.
If the objective is more teams in the playoffs, I would prefer they accomplished that with lots of small divisions, with a provision for wildcard teams only to replace division winners that couldn’t manage winning regular season records.
This is a horrible unnecessary idea. Tie-breaker division winners (even if they have a much much better record) are at a disadvantage relative to other division winners.
Is H2H record really considered a “formula” like it’s some complicated computer algorithm?
With the start of a one-game, winner-take-all wild-card round, the difference between first place and a wild-card berth is too important to decide with a random tiebreaker game instead of more accurate formula of who is better based on a very simple and fair calculation who beat the other team more over the season.
Ed, the 1978 tiebreaker game is a different case. The Red Sox and Yankees finished the season tied for first in the American League East (and tied at 99-63 is pretty damn impressive). There must not have been a H2H formula in place to determine the winner, as the Red Sox lost the season series 7-9, so there was a one-off game to get into the playoffs (and the game counts as a regular season game for statistical purposes).
The tiebreaker system was used because the difference between a wild card slot and a division winner wasn’t all that significant. When only one team out of two will make it to the postseason, it is *very* important and thus was always considered worthy of a playoff (traditionally, the NL used a three-game playoff while the AL used a single playoff game for their only pre-divisional playoff game–all divisional ties since 1969 have been resolved by a single playoff game).
IMO, it’s time to shorten the regular season–if we’re going to have all these playoff games, the reason for an extremely long regular season is diminished, and if I never see another postseason game played in the last three days of October or November, it will be too soon.