Team Entropy 2018: Let’s Play Two!

This is the seventh and final installment of this year’s Team Entropy series, my recurring look not only at the races for the remaining playoff spots but the potential for end-of-season chaos in the form of down-to-the-wire suspense and even tiebreakers. Ideally, we want more ties than the men’s department at Macy’s. If you’re new to this, please read the introduction here. And if you’ve been following along with this series, here and on Twitter, many thanks!

Pop the champagne! Team Entropy has done it — or rather the Brewers, Cubs, Dodgers, and Rockies have done it — producing an unprecedented level of end-of-season chaos in the form of two Game 163 tiebreaker games that will be played on Monday afternoon. The 1pm ET game between the Cubs and Brewers (both 95-67) in Chicago will decide the winner of the NL Central, which will also become the top seed in the NL; the loser will host the Wild Card game on Tuesday night. The 4pm ET game between the Dodgers and Rockies (both 91-71) in Los Angeles will decide the No. 2 seed in the NL, which will face the Braves (90-72) in the Division Series, while the loser will be the road team for the Wild Card game.

Before all of that transpires, it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate what just happened. The Cubs, who have held at least a share of first place in the NL Central since July 13 and had sole position from August 1 through September 28, had a 3.5-game lead on the Brewers as of September 18, but went just 6-5 thereafter, including Sunday’s win. The Brewers, who held a share of first place in the division for all but one day from May 13 to July 13, were six back as of August 28, before winning 22 of their final 29, including nine of their last 10 — and all of their final seven — to wind up tied.

Over in the NL West, the Dodgers, who began the year 16-26, only intermittently occupied first place, with a stretch from July 12 through August 11 accounting for 27 of their 40 days either sharing or having sole possession of the catbird seat. A 7-1 surge, one that included taking three out of four from the Cardinals and sweeping the Rockies, pushed them to a season high 2.5-game lead as of September 19. While they went 6-3 from that point, the Rockies, who themselves only spent 32 days with a share of first, caught fire and won eight in a row and nine out of their last 10.

The Cubs and Brewers clinched their playoff berths last Wednesday, while the Rockies clinched theirs on Friday. On that that same day, the Cubs pushed the Cardinals, who still had hopes of winning a Wild Card spot, to the brink of elimination. Both the Central and West divisions entered Saturday with their leaders (the Cubs and Rockies) ahead by a game, and from there — for the purposes of Team Entropy — everything kept coming up Milhouse. The ties page of our playoff odds report estimated the chances of an end-of-season deadlock in the Central at 25.9%, and in the West at 34.1%, which, by my math, meant an 8.8% chance of both happening. That’s more than 10 times what it was on the previous Sunday, when the Cubs and Dodgers led their divisions by 2.5 and 1.5 games, respectively.

On Saturday, the Cubs lost 2-1 to the Cardinals, keeping the latter’s slim playoff hopes alive, but only for a few hours. Soon after, the Dodgers dashed those hopes and clinched their own playoff spot in the process, with a 10-6 win over the Giants in San Francisco. That night, the Brewers closed the gap by beating the Tigers 6-5 behind a pair of home runs by Christian Yelich (who else?), while the Rockies let the Dodgers back into a tie when they were roughed up by the Nationals, 12-2.

Three of Sunday’s four relevant games — all of which were played simultaneously, starting at 3:05 pm ET, in a situation that tested the bandwidths of everybody with an MLB.TV plan — were extremely lopsided, with relatively little suspense except as it related to the bigger picture. The Dodgers plated two runs before they even made an out against Giants starter Andrew Suarez, piled up seven in the third to take a 9-0 lead, and won 15-0. With the Nationals choosing to start rookie Erick Fedde instead of Cy Young candidate Max Scherzer, the Rockies used two-run homers by Nolan Arenado and Charlie Blackmon and a three-run shot by David Dahl to build an early 7-0 lead. They ultimately won 12-0, with Arenado adding a second homer to take over the NL lead at 37 and Blackmon hitting for the cycle. The Brewers took a 2-0 lead over the Tigers in the first inning, added single runs in the fourth and sixth, and then piled on six in the seventh en route to an 11-0 win.

The Cubs, on the other hand, took the more difficult path by falling behind 2-0 in the first. Thanks to a barrage of extra-base hits by the usual suspects, they took control with a four-run third inning that chased starter Jack Flaherty, added four more in the fifth, and withstood a late challenge in which the Cardinals, though down 10-5, had the bases loaded in the seventh until Steve Cishek struck out Francisco Peña. That the Cubs needed nine pitchers, with relievers such as Brandon Kintzler and Carl Edwards Jr. looking rough while the other teams were able to rest their A-list guys, may be a factor over the next two days.

Major League Baseball hasn’t had a tiebreaker game since 2013, when the Rays downed the Rangers to claim the second AL Wild Card spot. There have been 14 tiebreakers in MLB history (15 if you count the replay of the tied game produced by Merkle’s Boner in 1908). Four of them were decided in best-of-three series that served as forerunners of the League Championship Series:

There have been nine tiebreaker elimination games since the start of division play in 1969, starting with Bucky Dent and company’s victory over the Red Sox in 1978. Dent’s Yankees were the last team to win a World Series after going this route. This is the first time a tiebreaker has been played merely for the purposes of establishing seeding, with no elimination at stake. When MLB switched from the single Wild Card format to the Wild Card game in 2012, the league decided that the right to avoid playing a single-elimination playoff game was worth playing off for itself. From 1994 (had the strike not intervened) through 2011, in the event of a tie after 162 games — such as was the case involving the 95-67 Yankees and Red Sox in 2005 — the division winner and Wild Card team would be decided on the basis of head-to-head records, with the loser at no discernible disadvantage thereafter except to be the road team in their playoff series. Now, to borrow colleague Sean Dolinar’s description from our in-house Slack channel, what we have is a four-team double-elimination bracket.

It’s imperfect, particularly when one considers that the NL playoff team with the worst record, the Braves, is the one getting a bye until Thursday’s Division Series opener. What’s also imperfect is that, since the tiebreakers are regular-season games, expanded rosters will still be in effect, so if things get out of control early, we might see guys who won’t come near a playoff series soaking up innings so that nobody who might be needed on Tuesday night is taxed. If things are tight late, you’re going to see a four-hour tribute to Tony La Russa in the form of matchup-induced pitching changes galore. Your mileage may vary, but I remain on board with preferring to see these teams play for the right not to have their backs to the wall on Tuesday than to have the seeding decided by the head-to-head records.

As it stands, the Cubs are starting lefty Jose Quintana (4.09 ERA, 4.52 FIP, 1.2 WAR) while the Brewers, after waiting until around 10 AM on Monday morning to show their hand, are going with Jhoulys Chacin (3.56 ERA, 3.99 FIP, 2.6 WAR), who is both on turn and their most valuable starter in terms of WAR. With Josh Hader, Jeremy Jeffress, Corey Knebel, Joakim Soria all rested — Hader hasn’t pitched since Friday, the other three each threw spotless innings on Saturday — they could have decided to hold Chacin back for Tuesday and just bullpen the hell out of Monday. The NL West tiebreaker has the better pitching matchup, even with staff aces Kyle Freeland and Clayton Kershaw not available, as the former pitched Friday, the latter Saturday. Call it a Wild West shootout featuring a pair of young guns, with the Rockies going forth with 23-year-old German Marquez (3.76 ERA, 3.33 FIP, 4.5 WAR) and the Dodgers countering with 24-year-old Walker Buehler (2.76 ERA, 2.98 FIP, 3.2 WAR). Damn, this is going to be fun.

It’s been fun already, of course. I started this Team Entropy thing in 2011, and even with playoff berths still in question heading into the final day of the regular every year except 2017, the lack of actual tiebreaker games in the past four years had me feeling like Linus van Pelt. With two tiebreaker games in one day, at long last the Great Pumpkin has finally arrived, and with apologies to the hardworking folks inconvenienced by the extra layer of complexity in the form of logistical nightmares, contingency plans, and travel away from their loved ones, I’d like to think we collectively willed this mess into existence. So let’s enjoy the hell out of Monday!