Tell me about ties/draws in baseball.

The Game Room
1

Tell me about ties/draws in Baseball. I always thought ties/draws were impossible.

Back story: Skip this paragraph if you don’t care. … If you’ve ever watched the TV show, “Cheers”, you probably remember the photographs shown during the opening credits. One of the photographs shows a man holding up a newspaper with the headline, “WE WIN!” in huge letters. Since “Cheers” was a TV show about a bar, aLmost everyone (myself included) assumed the headline concerned the repeal of prohibition. Now, I believe the headline refers to the Boston Braves winning the 1948 National League Pennant. If the headline is genuine, it was probably a Boston afternoon/evening newspaper published on the 29th of September, 1948, or a morning paper published the next day. My theory is based on a partially-legible sub-headline, “As Cards lose to B”. While letters after “B” are obscured, I assume the “B” word is “Bucs”. It’s kind of ironic that a show about a Red Sox player would have a photograph about a different baseball team.

Tell me about ties in baseball. When are they allowed to occur? Under what circumstances is the game replayed? If replayed, is it replayed from the beginning or continued from the point that the game was called? If the game is replayed, what happens if one of the player is not available for some reason? If a game is called before the end of the 7th inning, are all runs scored in that inning discarded regardless of who scored them? Here’s why I ask:

The Boston Braves and St. Louis Cardinals were competing for the National League pennant in 1948. Apparently, on 15-JUL-1948, the Braves and Chicago Cubs played to a 1-1 tie game. By September 26th, the Braves had won 87 games, lost 60, and tied one. At the same time, the Cardinals had won 81, lost 67. Each team had six games remaining. If the Braves had lost all remaining games, they would have had a 87-66-1 record. If St.Louis had won all remaining games, they would have had a 87-67 record. If that had happened, would the Braves be the pennant winner (by one half game) or would the Boston/Chicago tie game have been replayed? As it was, the Cardinals lost to Pittsburgh on September 29th, thereby assuring a pennant win for the Braves.

2

Ties can occur in suspended games and the result could become final if it is the last regularly scheduled game between the teams, the game went five full innings or more and the result, if different could alter the playoff picture for one or both teams. A tie could occur due to inclement weather, electrical problems or a variety of other reasons. The statistics that result from the game are included in final player and team results even if the game is unfinished. If it is not the last scheduled game between the two teams the game will be completed before the next game between the two teams in the same park or if there are none scheduled in the other team’s park.

3

It should be noted that the only tie in any of our lifetimes was the 2002 all-star game because there is no sense in getting stars hurt… (there are 2430 games played each year.)

4

Spring training games can end in ties, for what that is worth.

[QUOTE=bizerta]
If the Braves had lost all remaining games, they would have had a 87-66-1 record. If St.Louis had won all remaining games, they would have had a 87-67 record. If that had happened, would the Braves be the pennant winner (by one half game) or would the Boston/Chicago tie game have been replayed?
[/QUOTE]

A tie game is, in terms of its impact on the standings, not a game at all. They were not 87-66-1. They were 87-66.

5

bizerta, the first point that needs to be emphasized is that the rules concerning ties have evolved over the decades, and the rules today are very different than they were in 1948.

Today, when a baseball game is interrupted (usually by rain) and the score is tied after five or more innings have been played, the game is treated as a suspended game. It is resumed from the point of interruption as soon as possible. If the tied game is not the last game of its series, it will be resumed the next day, before the regularly scheduled game. If it was the last game of the series, it will be resumed the next time the two teams play. This may involve a lag of several months, and yes, players can be injured, traded, or sent to the minor leagues in the meantime. You resume with your roster as of the resumption date.

It is theoretically possible that a traded player could play for both sides within a single game, although to my knowledge this has never happened.

The only way that a game can end in a tie, today, is if it is interrupted, and it is the last scheduled game of the season between two teams, and it does not affect the final standings. If those conditions are true, the game will never be finished, will be recorded as a tie, and the statistics up to the point of interruption count in the players’ records.

All of this was not the case in decades past. In decades past, tie games were recorded immediately as ties, and never finished, and replayed as new games, from the beginning. Furthermore, before parks had lights, games could be interrupted by darkness as well as rain. So under those circumstances, ties were much more common.

You ask about fractional innings at the end of interrupted games. The rules on fractional innings changed several times over the years, and I will not discuss them here as they would make an already long post too long.

Finally, what about unplayed games at the end of the season? Unplayed games, in this context, include both rain outs which were never rescheduled, and tie games which (under the earlier rules) were never replayed. In the era of train travel, it was more difficult–often, impossible–to make up single games on off days after the teams separated to different cities. You would often have a number of these unplayed games as the season approached its end. Sometimes, they could affect the pennant race.

What were the rules? Frankly, I don’t know. Sometimes, as you’ve discovered, you will read that a certain team celebrated winning the pennant and you’ll look at the standings and wonder, shouldn’t team X have had to play that extra game? I suspect that league policy changed from time to time. I’ve never seen any documentation of those changes.

6

Games in Japan’s NPB may end in ties after 12 innings (or 15, in the first seven games of the Japan Series). Last year every team finished the season with from one to five ties. This worked just fine.
In MLB,

How about Astros at Reds, June 30, 2005?

7

Back when the season was 154 games, Lou Gehrig was listed as playing anywhere from 149 to 157 games during seasons in which he was playing in every Yankee game. I assume this was because in some seasons the Yankees were so far ahead they didn’t have to complete their schedule (in 1935, when Gehrig played in 149 games they are listed as going 89-60, or 149 games), while in others he got credit for partial games that were never finished and didn’t figure in the standings (in 1937 Gehrig is listed as playing in 157 games, although the Yankees are listed as having a record of 102-52, or 154 games).

8

If darkness halted a game, I’m quite sure it was always suspended and resumed. Only weather could result in tie games. The rules even went into detail about what happened if it became too dark during a rain delay. That’s why I recall darkness and weather were different.

9

Nope. “The rules” have been amended many times. There was no standard rule for suspending games before about 1953, and before stadium lights were typical, many games were ended by darkness, some of them tied.

10

You’re quite wrong. The longest game in baseball history ended after 26 innings, forever tied 1-1, because of darkness. There were ties due to darkness no less than three times in the World Series, in 1907, 1912, and 1922.

The rule was finally changed in 1969, by which time the Cubs had long since become the only team without lights. Many fans from that era remember darkness only from Cub games and assume–why, I have no idea–that the rule was always the same. It wasn’t.

11

I had to look this up, and it was a game from 1920 between the Brooklyn Robins and Boston Braves. What astounds me is that the 26-inning game was 3 hours, 50 minutes. The last Cubs game, which the Cubs won in the bottom of the 13th (so half this game’s inning count) took nearly 5 hours.

12

What astounds me is that both starting pitchers threw complete games.

13

This is highly dubious for two reasons:

(1) RULES: i.e. MLB rules and MLB Commissioner rulings. I mean, how many businesses and bosses (especially a boss like Judge K. M. Landis) let people just not show up for work, especially when doing so would disappoint no telling how many 10,000 fans.

(2) REVENUE. Those 10,000s of fans were PAYING CUSTOMERS. The Yankees and their opponents both could use that kind of money, in any season.

14

There’s nothing dubious about it. It’s a matter of historical record. There were large numbers of unplayed, or tied and never replayed, games in almost every major league season.

As I mentioned above, when you traveled across the country by train, you didn’t have the option of making up a game on a single date when both teams were off. Your only option was to turn a scheduled single game into a double-header. If it was late in the season, and there were already a lot of double-headers scheduled, teams would just drop games. It happened all the time. The walk-up gate for an unscheduled meaningless make-up game, in those days, would barely have covered the cost of train travel.

15

Actually, the 1935 season in the AL was pretty weird. Not a single AL team is credited with playing 154 games, but this is because some had ties.

W-L-T (Games played, plus ties) PCT Games Behind


Detroit Tigers	            93-58-1  (151+1)    .616	--
New York Yankees	    89-60-0  (149)      .597	3
Cleveland Indians	    82-71-3  (153+3)    .536	12
Boston Red Sox	            78-75-1  (153+1)    .510	16
Chicago White Sox	    74-78-1  (152+1)    .487	19½
Washington Senators         67-86-1  (153+1)	.438	27
St. Louis Browns	    65-87-3  (151+3)    .428	28½
Philadelphia Athletics	    58-91-0  (149)      .389	34

There were five ties, which didn’t count in the standings. In most cases teams seem to have played replacement games.

I’m having trouble understanding how the Tigers won the pennant by three games, even though the Yankees had five unplayed games (against Boston, Chicago (2), and Philadelphia (2)), especially since the article says they clinched the pennant with seven games left to play (of which they lost 6).

16

After thinking about it, I think what was probably going on was that if a team didn’t manage to complete all its games versus an opponent by the end of its last series, the results stood. As Freddy says, the cost and time of train travel would have precluded an unscheduled return to a city, even if a pennant were on the line. I bet the Yankees wished they had those two unplayed games with a patsy like Philadelphia that year.

Ties counted for zero in the standings and were not listed in the season records. However, another game would be played if possible to make up for it. This resulted in teams in 1935 playing anywhere from 149 to 156 games. Since stats from tie games counted, it explains how Gehrig could be credited for 157 games in years when the Yankees only played 154 games that counted in the standings.

17

Actually, the practice of not playing meaningless games persisted into the 60s. In 1967, for instance, the Cardinals and Cubs only played 161 games. It had not effect on the standings.

It might have caused an issue with the Reds, who would have been tied for third with the Cubs if the Cubs had lost the game. Tying for third place money would have been better than fourth place (players got bonuses if they finished in the top four, though not as much as the pennant winners).

Nowadays, they’d insist on playing that game.

18

Actually it persisted into 2015. The Indians and Tigers had a rain out late in the season last year that was not made up as it didn’t affect things.

19

But the issue here is games which did affect the pennant race.

Unplayed games affected a number of pennant races in the early 1900’s. Apparently they first became controversial in 1907, when the Detroit Tigers beat the Philadelphia A’s by 1.5 games. The Tigers had four unplayed games that year, and the A’s had the ridiculous total of 9.

The following winter the National League–which hadn’t had the problem–nevertheless moved to address it. According to historian David W. Anderson (More Than Merkle),

And indeed, during 1908 every game was played in the National League. The AL stuck with the older practice and had issues again as the final standings were Detroit 90-63, Cleveland 90-64, Chicago 88-64.

Afterward the AL adopted the NL rule. But the “if possible” clause left a loophole, and some games remained unplayed, even when, as in 1935, they could have reversed the outcome of the pennant race. The same happened in the 1938 NL race between the Pirates and Cubs.

Thus it was, to the OP’s question, that the Boston Braves could clinch the pennant on September 26, 1948, knowing that if they finished 87-66 they would beat the Cardinals at 87-67. Boston and Cincinnati had been rained out on September 20, on their last mutual game of the year. There was no policy at the time of making up games after the regularly scheduled end of the season, so that game was washed out forever.

At some point, undoubtedly after the advent of air travel, policy changed again so that unplayed games which affected the pennant race would be made up, even after the end of the regular season. In 2008, for example, the White Sox and Tigers had to play a makeup game on the Monday after the season ended, because the White Sox trailed the division-leading Twins by only half a game. The Sox won the makeup, so then the season was extended again for a tiebreaker game, which the White Sox also won.

20

According to current Yankees raincheck policy, no refunds are given for a game not played. You can either attend the rescheduled game as part of a double-header, or exchange the raincheck for a same-priced ticket within the next 12 months. So they don’t actually lose any money. In fact, since many people may not be able to reschedule they will make money. I imagine there were similar policies in place in the past.