IMHO baseball is a little different, in that there is no game clock, so an arbitrarily large comeback is theoretically possible. That being said, I’d suggest that 12+ runs is about right for baseball, not 5 or 6. The team that’s ahead 11-6 in the 9th inning could very easily have been the team that was down 6-1 in the 7th inning.
I agree, 5-6 runs isn’t a big margin in baseball at all. Plenty of teams overcome those deficits. Expanding the lead to double digits is perfectly fair.
Then why didn’t you end it? Forfeit the game and go home. How is continuing the humiliation any better?
There might be a cultural divide. Here in England this sort of victory (and the one over San Mario) never gets questioned as to whether it’s good sportsmanship or not. It just never comes up, if these teams choose to enter the competitions where they might play a much better team, then that’s their lookout. And as previously mentioned, goal difference.
A ticket costs the same, whether it’s 20-0 or 1-1. If I pay to watch, do I want to see the guys passing the ball back and forth for 45 minutes?
It’s a World Cup qualifier - goal difference is a tiebreaker.
Same thing here in Australia. It would be considered in really bad taste to deliberately not try to score against an opposing team because you were showing them “mercy.” Mind you, in most sports that are played here it would be hard not to score other than by giving the ball to the other team - all the time.
When I was younger I played games in both positions - as a member of a team that had no chance against a superior opponent, and the opposite. Sure, the reserves may have got more of a run than usual but that would be the only concession made.
Not since Victor Von Doom took over in the late '60s.
That’s Latveria… 
(I admit that I think of DD often when I hear “Latvia” though.)
Five goals scored in the last 10 minutes. 
I see the tiebreaker comments - overall goal differential is only the 6th tiebreaker (the first five relate to comparisons of tied teams).
Then they should eliminate it as a tiebreaker to avoid this situation. They have enough other tiebreakers it isn’t necessary.
I don’t think avoiding a rout of your opponent is really a thing in the US, either. I remember being dumbfounded as a kid when I learned that in Japanese baseball it was considered disgraceful to win by too large a margin.
I’m not following, if they have enough tiebreakers already, what situation are we avoiding?
The situation where a team has an incentive to run up the score on an inferior opponent. You know, the whole point of this thread. Remove that as a tiebreaker and teams would be less likely to do that. If indeed it’s not necessary to make that a tiebreaker.
Softball and (non-MLB) baseball often plays with a mercy rule - one team ahead by so many runs after so many innings wins the game at the end of that or any later inning.
It’s less for sportsmanship than for scheduling, generally - at tournaments, teams play multiple times in a day, and one game running over can really mess with later start times. It’s still an issue with extra innings, of course, but when one team has established a level of dominance over the other, there’s little point to investing more time to belabor an already-proven point.
Yeah, still not making sense. You seem to be saying it’s not meaningful as a tiebreaker, while still incenting a high goal differential, while also being sarcastic over something relatively unimportant. It’s a weird flex, but whatever.
The 2009 Confederations Cup group B went down to the goals scored tiebreaker - goal differential was even between the U.S. and Italy. The next tiebreaker would have had Italy go through to the knockouts, but the U.S. made up a 6-goal difference in goal differential on the last day’s matches and in the end had scored one more goal in group play than Italy - and so went through.
But I think there should be some way to cushion the effect of a single blowout match in a qualifying group situation. Maybe exponential decay of margin of victory - first two goals count normally, next two goals count for 1/2 each, each later pair counts 1/2 each of the previous pair. A single blowout couldn’t count for more than +4 goals of victory margin, and there would be less incentive for another team to blow out the team that had already been beaten badly just to keep up with the Joneses.
Let’s re-examine your comments.
You object to them running up the score, even putting in an eye roll emoji, which is understandable. 20-0 is pretty extreme and I am sympathetic to complaints about that being an example of bad sportsmanship.
You then go on to point out that goal differential is only the 6th tiebreaker, that teams would have to be tied in 5 different other ways before goals matter. That implies that it’s not important, a further criticism of the practice of running up the score. Again, I’m with you there, if goal differential is unlikely to matter then it makes the practice of scoring an egregious number of goals even more questionable. That’s a good point.
So my suggestion was that if you have so many other tiebreakers ahead of goal differential, to the degree that it’s unlikely to matter, then why not just discount that as a tiebreaker altogether? The rules should be changed to no longer count that. Therefore teams will be more likely to rest their best players once the win is certain, to protect them, and the other team is (theoretically) less humiliated.
There was no sarcasm. You asked what “situation” would be fixed, as if you forgot what thread you were in or even what you wrote. I displayed some incredulity at that.
Does that make sense now? I didn’t think I was being obtuse, it definitely wasn’t intentional. I thought my suggestion was pretty rational based on your information.
(Let me also add, that if indeed it is critical for goal differential to remain as a tiebreaker to avoid problems in ranking, then it’s unfair to criticize a team that wants to advance.)
This seems like a very reasonable compromise.
By the way, in American gridiron football there is no advantage between winning big and winning small. A win is a win. You do often see large disparities in scores but just as often you see them put in backups late in the game when there is isn’t enough time for the other team to plausibly score enough points to catch up. That’s usually referred to as “garbage time” and you’ll hear about “garbage time points” that are scored by the losing team when the winning team puts in their second- or third-string players.
It’s done for practical purposes more than for sportsmanship; in that sport especially it’s common for serious injuries to occur and it’s sensible to save your most important players for when it matters.
Strange - in the men’s World Cup qualifying, overall goal difference is the second tiebreaker. I wonder why it’s different…although I have a feeling that it’s more likely for there to be a team that has little business being there in the women’s tournament than the men’s, and UEFA doesn’t want it turned into a “who can score the most goals against the weak team?” contest. (IIRC, in the CONCACAF qualifier for the 1991 Women’s World Cup, the only time USA didn’t win by at least 8 was its 5-0 win over Canada - and back then, they played only 40-minute halves as somebody was afraid that there were still too many countries that couldn’t field teams of enough women fit enough to last 90 minutes.)