Tiebreakers

Morning Dose: Tuesday, September 16

☀️ GOOD MORNING:

The Phillies are National League East champions, again.

How far the Mets have fallen since sporting a 5.5-game lead with on June 12.

Philly’s dramatic win, after arriving in Los Angeles in the wee hours due to a mechanical issue on their plane, clinched the division on Monday, and puts them in pole position for a first-round bye.

If the Mets make another magical October run, they will most likely have to go through the Dodgers, Phillies, and perhaps Milwaukee, the same path as last season, in reverse.

🤪 GETTING WILD: The Amazins welcome the Padres to Citi Field this week with a minuscule 1.5-game lead over Arizona for the final wild card spot. The Diamondbacks dominated the Giants last night to pick up a 1/2 game in the standings.

A lot of you sent questions about the wild-card tiebreaking procedures, so let’s use break them down in more detail.

☕️ Grab your coffee for your morning dose of Mets Fix!

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Full Standings | SOS

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✂️ TIEBREAKERS

If the season ended today, the Mets would be in the playoffs and would travel to Hollywood to play a three-game set against the Dodgers. The winner of that series would play the Phillies in the National League Division Series.

The next two weeks will decide if that remains a reality.

To help us understand the tiebreaking procedures, I included a tiebreaker column on the standings graphic to show which teams the Mets hold a tiebreaker advantage over. There are no more one-game playoffs in baseball. All regular season ties are broken by tiebreakers.

Put simply, depending on if the Mets hold the tiebreaker, you can add or subtract one game to New York’s true lead in the standings. As of this morning, that technically puts Arizona 1/2+ game back, Cincinnati 1+ games back and San Francisco 3+ games back. I add the “+” because a team like the Reds could still finish one-game back if they only play one game better than the Mets the rest of the way, but it shows you how many games better the Mets must be to maintain a wild-card spot, given the current tiebreakers.

⚾️ TIES BETWEEN TWO TEAMS

The first tiebreaker between two teams is head-to-head record. Pretty straight forward and simple.

The second tiebreaker, if two teams have the same head-to-head record, is intra-division record, regardless of whether the two teams play in the same division.

The third tiebreaker, if somehow the first two are tied, is inter-division record, which is settled based on how each team played against teams within their league but outside of their division.

There are additional levels of tiebreakers, but we will leave those aside for now.