We are in an incredible season of playoff races, with both Wild Card situations featuring five teams within five games of one another and a couple divisions still up in the air. We could get our first tiebreaker game since 2018. We could get two tiebreaker games. We could—yes, brace yourself—get a three or more-way tie.
Alright, let’s look at the numbers.
FanGraphs keeps tabs on how likely this is, because God bless FanGraphs that’s what FanGraphs is there to do. Here’s where things stand, entering play tonight:
One great thing about where we’re at is that if there’s a tie in the NL West, it’s not going to affect whether there’s a Wild Card tie. These two are independent. Taking that into account and multiplying out the probability that there’s at least one tiebreaker game between the AL Wild Card race, the NL Wild Card race, and the NL West race, we get a 40.6% probability of getting our beloved extra single-elimination game.
But it’s better than that.
There’s some correlation between the NL East tie and the NL Wild Card tie, I’d imagine, given the NL East challengers are also NL Wild Card challengers. That means we can’t just fold that 6.0% into our calculation. But it also means…double tiebreaker? Say we get Atlanta and Philadelphia tied at the end of the year, and they’re also tied with either the Padres, Reds, or Cardinals. Boom. We’ve got our three-way tie. And even more complicated than a normal three-way tie, because of the whole slippery-slope thing for whoever loses the NL East tiebreaker game. The possibilities here are boundless. We could have a three-way tie for the first Wild Card spot in the AL, which I think would require eliminating one team via two games and then playing the Wild Card Game on top of that? Do I have that right? The odds are low, but 1-in-40 isn’t nonexistent. That’s double the chance the Padres win the World Series and they’re still tuning in.
It’s more likely than not that we don’t get a tiebreaker. But it’s almost as possible we will. And it’s still possible, less than three weeks away from finding out, that we get the oft-dreamed-of most chaotic tiebreaker scenario in MLB history.
Do what your faith tradition allows.
