What would happen regarding home field advantage in this situation?

Question

Lets say Arizona won the West with a 90-72 record and New York and Philadelphia tied for the East with the same 90-72 record. Mets/Phillies play a tiebreak game for the East title. One team then ends up with a 91-72 record. How would that affect home field in a matchup with Arizona? Since both teams would have had the same record if not the East division title tiebreaker.

But the game is counting in regular season records, mlb.com is showing Col and SD with 163 played. Plus, all the stats count, so the pitchers on a team can't combine to have 90 wins, but the team only account for 89 as a team.

Answer 1

The only way, in this scenario, that the Mets and Phils play a tiebreaker is if they need to settle the NL East (yes) but the wildcard is coming from a different division... and it cannot be from the West because Arizona won there with the same record. That means the wildcard is from the Central, and with 91+ wins, the division champion has even more. MLB ignores the addition of playoff games into the season standings for the purposes of determining seedings when a tie messes things up; a statistical tiebreaker between Arizona and the East champ would be used, with head-to-head record the first option. Therefore...

#1 seed -- Central champ
#2 seed -- season series winner* between Arizona and East champ
#3 seed -- season series loser* between Arizona and East champ
#4 seed -- wildcard, from Central

* or further down the tiebreaker options, if necessary.

The NL Division Series would then line up as Central against #3 and #2 against wildcard.

Answer 2

Nice Question!

However, i don't think you could award home field advantage on the basis of an extra game as it would be unfair to the team that won their division outright in the regular season. In this scenario, Arizona won their division in 162 games while it took the winner of the playoff 163 games to do the same. That said, I would say the winner of a playoff is automatically declared the lowest seed.

Answer 3

Well if Arizona were to face the NL East Champs in the National League Finals then the home field would go to the team that won the coin flip. If I recall it was Philadelphia that won a coin flip for this and next would have been Arizona and then New York, meaning if Philadelphia were to advance they would have home field if New York were to have advance then Arizona would have it. Also all games before the playoffs count as regular season games meaning if Philadelphia were to had to play New York in a playoff game that game counts, (also the winner of that game would have had to play the winner of the San Diego/Colorado game and that game would have counted)

Answer 4

Very interesting question. If baseball stays true to form they would have to give home field to the best record. Since a playoff game IS considered part of the regular season, I'd have to say best record by 1/2 game. If this isn't right than baseball might have to revert back to who had the best head to head record. I'm sure somewhere buried in the baseball rule book they have considered this scenario.

Answer 5

Hmmm. That is a good question. According to Wikipedia, I know, "They are officially considered part of the regular season and are included in the standings. The player stats are included in the regular-season stats." So, sadly, the Phillies would get home-field.

Answer 6

The game does not count in the records for regular season. Therefore the head to head matchups from the regular season are used to determine home field advantages. Also, if the Mets had won on Sunday it would have triggered a 3 day playoff scenario to determine the playoffs so it wouldn't be just the one extra game.

Answer 7

Wrong, Scubasteve.
Any games played to resolve a regular season tie contriobute to the regular season numbers for each player involved. Always been that way.