Did the Cardinals Get Robbed of a Chance at a Win?

On Wednesday night, the Cardinals trailed the Brewers 5-3 entering the eighth inning. As the home team, St. Louis went back out on defense to start the frame. Lefty Tyler Webb retired the Brewers on eight pitches. Before the Cardinals could take their turn at the plate in the bottom of the eighth, however, it started raining. Confusion and more rain ensued.

Now, the Brewers had come up to bat in the top of the eighth, so the Cardinals were supposed to get a chance to at least finish the inning, right? That’s what the press box in St. Louis was originally told, but that statement was clarified.

As for the rule, MLB’s website states:

If a regulation game is terminated early due to weather, the results are considered final if the home team is leading. If the home team is trailing, the results are considered final if the game is not in the midst of an inning when the visiting team has taken the lead.

The rule is fairly clear that since the Brewers began the eighth inning with the lead, once the game is terminated, the Brewers get the win. A suspension to pick up the game at a later date wasn’t an option for this game. As Derrick Goold indicated above, general practice is to let the home team get as many cracks at scoring as the visiting team. If the game were to continue, the teams would have had to wait until at least 11:30 or 12, when the rain got lighter and died down. The Cardinals remained at home for their next game while the Brewers made the trip back to Milwaukee with an offday before their game on Friday. While I can’t say whether or not the result was fair, or look up all the instances in which games were delayed and then continued and to which this rule might have been applied, we can go back and look at all the instances when a game was terminated.

After a few searches on Baseball-Reference’s Play Index, I came up with a list of games since 1980 when the home team lost getting somewhere between 22 and 27 outs on the pitching side but fewer than that at bat. Since 1980, there have been 31 such games, though it’s really 30 games; the Dodgers were forced to forfeit a 1995 tilt against the Cardinals when Raul Mondesi and Tommy Lasorda were thrown out in the ninth inning after fans, who had received souvenir baseballs as a giveaway, proceeded to threw those baseballs onto the field for several minutes.

So we are dealing with about an average of one per year. The St. Lous game was just the sixth incidence this decade, and only the second in the last five years. The full list is below, with the stage of the game and the run-differential at the time the game was called. The time when the game is called is listed by inning with either top if the game was in the middle of the top-half inning, middle if the home team hadn’t batted, or bottom if the home team had started to bat, but did not finish:

In looking at the margin of victory, we can see the Cardinals-Brewers game was one of the closer affairs. In fact, it is the closest game to be terminated in this fashion in more than a decade. Looking at estimated win probability can further illuminate how close this game was compared to the others. When the game was called on Wednesday, the Cardinals had a 16.2% chance at winning under normal circumstances. Here’s where the rest of the games fall:

That top game between the Yankees and Brewers was just a week before the strike, and the weather was quite bad in old County Stadium. According to Jack Curry, in the New York Times:

With the Yankees leading, 2-1, in the bottom of the eighth, Bob Wickman replaced Hitchcock. Before he could throw a pitch, a spectacular rainstorm erupted and turned County Stadium into a quagmire. The violent weather emptied seats and flooded dugouts. The runway between the Yankee dugout and clubhouse was so soaked, Don Mattingly needed a security escort to travel through the stands to get to the clubhouse.

After a 68 minute delay, the game was called.

Notes on Other Games

• The White Sox and Indians matchup occurred with just three games left in the regular season and both teams out of the playoffs.
• The 2001 contest between the Blue Jays and the Tigers, in addition to being a September matchup of two losing teams, featured a two-hour delay earlier in the game. When it was called, the field was deemed too muddy to play on.
• At the time of the Reds-Braves game, the Reds had the worst record in the National League and the teams waited an hour and a half before the game was called.
• The Mets and Cubs met 27 years ago; only 11,000 fans showed up to the mid-September match-up between also-rans and “torrential rain” meant the teams waited an hour and a half before the game was called.
• The 1994 game between the Cardinals and Marlins was the last game either played that season before the strike.
• I’m not entirely sure what happened in the 1980 A’s-Blue Jays game, but the last play of the game was a passed ball while Rickey Henderson was at the plate.
• The Cubs and Astros were delayed at Wrigley in 2008 for two hours and 45 minutes in the fifth inning. When lightning and rain returned in the eighth inning at around 11:15 pm, the game was called. LaTroy Hawkins started an inning that was not the ninth, got one out, and earned the save, which has to be unusual.

Among the games when the home team had at least a 10% chance of winning, Wednesday’s game marks a rarity. Even within that small group of contests, this game appears to be fairly atypical, given that it had playoff implications for the home team and that the weather issues weren’t so severe that the field would have been rendered unplayable. If the game had been tied, or the Brewers had just taken the lead, the clubs would have either played the game out or concluded it in a few weeks when Milwaukee heads back to St. Louis. Without those circumstances, the only option was to play the game out on Wednesday night/Thursday morning. I won’t go so far as to say that taking away a 16% chance at a win — and the 4% division odds change that would have come with it — is unfair. But it’s definitely unusual.