Throughout the history of baseball, there have been a total of 14 tiebreaker games. Back then, teams with identical records not finding any proper way to decide who should continue in their venture towards a championship always settle on a single-game (or series) playoff. The result is straightforward, the winner moves on and the loser goes home.
The first one came in 1946, where the St. Louis Cardinals defeated the then-Brooklyn (now Los Angeles) Dodgers in a best two games out of three series to clinch the National League pennant (they would ultimately win the World Series that year against the Boston Red Sox in seven games). The next four instances would see this same setting where teams vouch for their right to enter the World Series as pennant winners in a short series.
That all changed in 1978 where, instead of a league championship being up for grabs, a division title was at stake in a one-game playoff which was won by the New York Yankees over their fierce rivals in the Red Sox. All games that came after that occasion took similar suit. Yes, there was a change in the postseason format in 2012 that included a new play-in stage called the Wild Card Game, but that game only features the two teams with the best records that didn’t finish as division champions, not those with identical records. As such, Wild Card Games can’t count when it comes to adding them to the total of tiebreaker games.
Tiebreaker games are so rare that whenever a possibility comes up for it to happen, regardless of its improbable realization, people hound on it hoping that it would happen. They actually want to see it happen in their lifetimes. This game brings chaos to teams who play them, and boy, people love watching chaos. Those sick people!
And yet, this year, this particular year, those fans got their wish. Two tiebreaker games were played on Monday. TWO. Who knows if something like this will ever happen again. Regardless, being agog over an intertwining of fates between four teams is not the important part. Baseball is, and it has to be played to solidify the National League postseason seeding.
In those two games, we had the Chicago Cubs vs Milwaukee Brewers and the Los Angeles Dodgers vs Colorado Rockies. Both of them were played in succession, with the former starting at 12:05 CST in Wrigley Field and the latter starting at 3:05 CST in Dodger Stadium.
The scenarios were simple:
If the Dodgers win, they take the NL West Division and will host the Atlanta Braves in the National League Division Series. The same goes for the Rockies if they win. More importantly, the loser of this game will play as the visiting team in the NL Wild Card Game on Tuesday.
Over in the NL Central tiebreaker, its winner will be decided between the Cubs or the Brewers, while the loser is forced to play as the host of said Wild Card Game on Tuesday.
Now then, with the background information for this recherché now established, let’s see how these four teams did in their respective games.
