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Originally Posted by joeswell
Thanks for your answer.
I'm not crazy about this feature. In real baseball, if there was a simple tie at the end of a season, there'd be a playoff game. If they had that rule in real baseball, there never would have been a walk off homer by Bobby Thompson in 1951 or that Red Sox-Yankees playoff in 1978... Bucky Dent never would have hit that cheap home run.
I hope they fix this. Could I schedule a playoff manually?
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Not so. In 2005 (last year) the Yankees and the Red Sox had the same record at the end of the season. In the end, the Yankees had the better season series record, and I believe that was 10-9 in favor of the Yankees. Close, but the Yankees still had one more win. Baseball ruled that depending on the outcome of the central division in the American League, there would be no play off, and the Yankees would be division winners, and the Red Sox the wild card. Detroit (or Minn., I am not sure which) was eliminated and the White Sox were the division leaders. The Red Sox had the best "second place" record. The Yankees had the same record, but because the season series belonged to the Yankees, they were listed as the offial divions winners, being given home field advantage. It didn't matter though. The White Sox went on to win the whole thing.
Bucky Den'ts home run was great, no doubt, but sadly, the wild card did not exist then, and so because of that, the league schedules were "round robin" so to speak, and were balanced. This ended in a smple tie. Therefore, they had the play off. In todays game, with a third round in the play offs, managers do not want their pitching staves messed up, so they opted to go with these types of tie breakers. My issue with the wild card (and not to bring up the debate) is that it is less important to win your division as it used to be. All you have to do is make the playoffs. As the Marlians (twice), the Angels, Giants, Astros, and Red Sox, and Mets.. None of these temas were division winners, yet all appeared in the World Series as league champions.