RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 1 sourcesNapoleon at the Battle of Quatre Bras on 16 June 1815, First quarter of 19th cen. Private Collection. Creator: Anonymous. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images via Getty Images) | Getty Images
Did Napoleon have a tiebreaker for Waterloo?
Just right now I notice that the Cleveland Guardians were once called the Cleveland Napoleons. I think I have a new personal most hated team. On the other hand, you can’t blame today’s team for the errors of the past. The reasoning of changing the team’s name from imperialism to native-american is maybe beyond my grisp of understanding and perhaps too American for me. But let’s not discuss that.
For every series there is good news and there is bad news. Shall we take a look?
The good news is that we won our previous series, against the Pirates. The bad news about that is that we now have a possible tiebreaker equation that not even Einstein is able to resolve. The good news about that is that on the AZSnakePit we have our contributor samath , who knows everything about tiebreakers. This is what he wrote before the final game of our series in Pittsburgh:
Thus far, the Pirates have gone 18-14 against their own division while the Diamondbacks have gone 21-11, each with 20 games left to play. Here’s the full breakdown of games left:
Pirates: 7 vs. MIL, 3 vs. CHC, 6 vs. STL, 4 vs. CIN (6 home, 14 away)
Dbacks: 3 vs. LAD, 7 vs. SDP, 4 vs. SFG, 6 vs. COL (10 home, 10 away)
So in that subset, with a clearly harder schedule, the Pirates would have to make up 3 games on the Diamondbacks. And for the tiebreaker to matter, the Diamondbacks would have to also make up at least 1 game in the 33 extradivision games each have left, where the Diamondbacks have a clearly harder schedule (I’ve sorted by current record and crossed out the common opponents for clarity):
Pirates: 3 vs. LAD, 3 vs. CWS, 3 vs. BOS , 3 vs. SDP, 3 vs. MIA , 6 vs. DET, 3 vs. NYM, 3 vs. SFG, 3 vs. KCR , 3 vs. LAA (18 home, 15 away)
Dbacks: 3 vs. ATL, 3 vs. NYY, 3 vs. CHC, 3 vs. PHI, 3 vs. BOS , 3 vs. TEX, 3 vs. CLE, 3 vs. MIA , 3 vs. HOU, 3 vs. CIN, 3 vs. KCR (18 home, 15 away)
These sort of surprising combinations of results can happen, of course — the Pirates bookended their first half by losing a series to the Mets and sweeping the Brewers, for instance — but they aren’t likely, which is why I have the Diamondbacks clearly favored in that tiebreaker.
Of course, all of this is entirely irrelevant if the Pirates win the head-to-head tiebreaker. And the Pirates are the main wildcard competitor for that third spot right now. Fangraphs puts the Diamondbacks’ current playoff odds at 38%, the seventh-highest in the NL, immediately behind the Pirates at 40%. Those numbers have each jumped by about 5% with each game this series, which is a lot for games in July.
All this to say, the next game is very, very important.
Here’s the real list:
Head-to-head
Intradivision record
Intraleague record
Post-ASG intraleague
Post-ASG + 1 game intraleague
Post-ASG + 2 games intraleague
etc.
This will always eventually resolve, because different teams play different number of interleague games at different times.
How to determine playoff tiebreakers
The good news (for thinking through this, not for the Diamondbacks) is that in the four years of this system so far, no ties have ever made it past head-to-head!
As a follow-up, I also asked ChatGPT to analyze all 11 ties in the divisional era (1969 onwards) that went to game 163’s before the modern tiebreaker rules were in effect. Out of all 11, 10 would have been resolved by head-to-head, while only the 1980 NL West tie between the Dodgers and Astros would have gone to the intradivisional record.
So yeah, this tiebreaker I analyzed extensively would only have mattered once in the last 50+ years…
Was there a tiebreaker for Napoleon in Waterloo? Of course there was not. Napoleon learned what we know in “soccer” since our early days as a European kid, like Gary Lineker once said: “…in the end the Germans always win”. We have Max Kepler on our team, so, in that regard, we had some extra good news.
The bad news: Pfaadt and Rodriguez pitched in Pittsburgh and Cleveland is fighting for the division or to get a Wild Card. We can prepare ourselves for a tough series in Ohio.
Odds are, we win this series.
Sticking to baseball matters and modern day, Cleveland had a quiet off-season. Their biggest move was probably the 7-year extension they handed out to their star third baseman Jose Ramirez. Veteran catcher Austin Hedges and reliever Kolby Allard were resigned. Only veteran reliever Jakob Junis was lost in free agency, to Texas, and to fill that gap Cleveland signed reliever Shawn Armstrong from that same team. With former Diamondback Steven Vogt at the helm for the third consecutive season, the Guardians were surely banking on another AL Central division win, with probably only the Detroit Tigers as a possible competitor. As things turned out, the Chicago White Sox put themselves in the conversation in what has been a really weird American League this year, and starting this series, the Guardians see themselves 1.5 games back in the AL Central with a 56-54 record, occupying the final spot in the Wild Card standings, 1 game ahead of the Houston Astros.
The Cleveland offence is ranked in the lower half of the MLB, fWAR wise. OPS+ puts them ahead of only the Mets, Phillies and Blue Jays in the MLB (themselves also somewhat surprisingly the weakest offences in the league). Biggest problem for Cleveland is getting runners on base, with their .230 batting average the second lowest in the MLB. Their base-on-ball numbers are pretty good, but with such a low batting average and their slugging the worst in the entire league, it is not a surprise that their RBI numbers are also the second lowest in the league. When one of your best batters is called “Austin Hedges”, 113 OPS+, you know you have a problem....
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