You Wouldn’t Have Noticed If MLB Had Ties in 2018

There are a few articles, including one by Travis Sawchik, arguing that tie games might not be as bad for baseball as you think. The truth is that not only would ties have had no impact on who reached the postseason in 2018, but they would have shaved off four minutes from the average time time.

Using regular expression to parse box score data from RetroSheet, I’ve looked at how the 2018 season would’ve been different without extra innings. Here’s a look at the postseason standings as they were compared to how they would’ve looked with ties (scored 3 points for a W, 1 point for a T, and 0 for a L):

With ties, the 2018 postseason still has the same cast of characters, although the Dodgers and the Rockies would have swapped places in the NL West, causing the Dodgers to go to the Wild Card game.

That’s only looking at 2018. When examining the past five seasons, I found that the postseason implications of tie games would be pretty minimal.

In the plot below, each point represents one team’s season. The X-axis is the number of games that would end in ties and the Y-axis is the number of places a team would’ve moved in their division.

For simplicity, I’m defining postseason implications (PS Implications) as a team missing or making a Division No. 1 or Wild Card No. 1 or No. 2 with the scoring system described above.

There are 150 distinct points, so there is a lot of overlap going on, but the main thing to note is that there’s no obvious trend between tie games and division standings. For example, if teams are making the postseason by gutting out dozens of extra-inning games, we’d expect to see the dots with 15-plus ties below the X-axis, but we are not.

In reality, 80% (121/150) of the points are on the X-intercept (y = 0), which means that 80% of the time, teams would have ended the season with the same division standing. In only three cases would a team have moved two division spots: the 2014 Marlins (+2) and the 2014 Braves and 2017 Mariners (-2).

For the teams that would have made or missed the postseason, all the winners (2014 Blue Jays and Brewers, 2015 Angels, and 2016 Cardinals in orange points) had 12 or fewer ties, while the losers had 11 or more.

Of the losers, none of the teams made it past the Division Series and only the 2015 Astros and 2016 Giants made it out of the Wild Card game. With that in mind, it seems likely that swapping out those teams would not have affected the Division Series or World Series outcomes.

Impact of Ties on Game Duration

For the past five MLB seasons, less than 10% of games went into extra innings, but the difference in game times is massive. Below are the average durations in minutes for games that went into extras compared to those that didn’t.

Games that went into extras lasted on average 48 minutes longer. That’s an additional 48 punishing, beer-less minutes for diehard fans. *It is worth noting that five games in 2018 went fewer than nine innings.

We know that the MLB has considered a few rule changes to speed up games. If MLB and Manfred are really trying to reduce game durations, they should think hard about allowing ties.

We know that tie games are guaranteed to go through the bottom of the ninth inning. Using this, we can substitute the duration of extra-inning games with that of 54-out games to estimate how season averages would look with ties (orange dots) versus reality (black dots).

The trend is consistent: cutting extra innings would shave four minutes off of the average game length for an entire season. This is about the same impact that shorter inning breaks, reduced time for pitching changes, and limited mound visits had in 2018.

There are some other potential benefits of shorter games with guaranteed endings:

• Lower workloads: Every inning saved is more arms getting additional rest.
• Exciting finishes: A scoring system that awards wins more than ties would incentivize teams to go big in the ninth. This would cause…
• More butts in seats, both at the stadium and watching at home. I know I’ll sometimes change the channel on a game when it’s going into extras.

In conclusion, cutting extra innings from the MLB regular season would have an impact, but just not on who wins the World Series.