The league developed this system to settle home-field disputes in recent years and will certainly keep the trains running on time and the curtain rising on ESPN’s suite of wild-card round games that begin with a quadrupleheader on Oct.
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If still tied, the involved teams will then look to intra-division winning percentage, followed by inter-division winning percentage, followed by best intra-league winning percentage over the final half of games, plus one until the tiebreaker is broken. Instead of a playoff to determine division or wild card winners, MLB will instead revert to an NFL-style tiebreaker that begins with head-to-head records of the teams involved.
The question that this season may partially answer is whether the competitive integrity of the season will be compromised. Twelve games are always better for the bottom line than one, which is why ESPN shelled out between $85 million and $100 million for the expanded 12-team field, a key element in collective bargaining agreement talks that finally settled in March after a 99-day lockout.īut time is finite, especially in a sport with six weeks of spring training, a 162-game season, and now a four-round tier of playoffs.
Rather than one winner-take-all game and a just-in-case set of tiebreakers – the last coming in 2018, when the NL West (Rockies-Dodgers) and Central (Brewers-Cubs) both needed an extra day to settle things – why not peddle four best-of-three wild-card miniseries across the ESPN family of networks? You can certainly see the appeal to ESPN, which owned the rights to any Game 163 tiebreakers as well as one of the wild-card games. HELP IS ON THE WAY: Injured MLB stars who could shake up the standings PENNANT RACE: Yankees' struggles, Dodgers' injuries are cause for concern
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It’s ostensibly in the name of both revenue and progress, to squeeze in dates on an unforgiving baseball calendar for a three-game wild card series that replaces the one-game format that provided big thrills but also instant closure to playoff losers. And Russ Hodges, we’re afraid you wouldn’t be immortalized today if your epic call was merely, “The Giants win the tiebreaker! The Giants win the tiebreaker!”Ī rare but venerated bit of baseball tradition – the playoff game to decide a division or playoff deadlock after 162 games – has fallen victim to modern times, a nine-inning test to decide a season-long struggle giving way to a tiebreaker system. Watch Video: Wynton Bernard calls mom with good news: He's headed to the MLBįarewell, Bucky Bleeping Dent.
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