Major League Baseball tie-breaking procedures are used by Major League Baseball (MLB) to break ties between teams for qualification and seeding into the MLB postseason. The procedures in use since 2022, when a third wild card team and resulting Wild Card Series were added for both the American League and National League, are outlined below.
One-game tiebreakers were played between teams tied for a division championship or a league's second wild-card berth. These games were played the day after the season was scheduled to end. Home-field advantage was determined using the rules listed below ("Breaking Ties Without Playoff Games").
From the implementation of the wild-card in 1994 to the end of the 2011 season, a different rule was in place. Two teams tied for a division did not play a tiebreaker if their records were better than all non-division winners in their league. Instead, said tie was broken using the rules listed below ("Breaking Ties Without Playoff Games"). This scenario happened in the 2001 when the Houston Astros and St. Louis Cardinals tied for first in the National League Central with 93–69, in 2005, the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox each finished 95–67 in the American League East, and in 2006, the San Diego Padres and Los Angeles Dodgers finished tied with 88–74 in the National League West. The team that won the season series (the 2001 Astros, 2005 Yankees, and 2006 Padres) was the division champion, thus receiving a better seed in the postseason. The other team (the 2001 Cardinals, 2005 Red Sox, and 2006 Dodgers) was seeded as the wild card.
However, when a second wild-card berth was adopted, thus requiring the establishment of the Wild Card Game beginning in 2012, the non-division winner with the best record in the league faced possible elimination on the first day of the postseason. Consequently, the tie-breaking rules were changed so that two teams tied for a division championship had to play a tiebreaking game even if both teams had already qualified for the postseason. The team losing the tie-breaking game qualified for a wild-card berth only if its regular-season record was among the league's two best records for non-division-winners. If that team were tied for the second wild-card spot, a second tie-breaking game would have been played.[1][2]
If, on the other hand, two teams had been tied for the first wild-card spot, no tie-breaking game would have been played. Rather, the two teams simply played against each other in the Wild Card game, with home-field advantage awarded using tie-breaking rules described in the next section.[1][2]
Beginning with the 2022 season, a third wild-card berth per league was adopted. The tiebreaker game format was eliminated, to compensate for the expanded (12-team) postseason.
Coin tosses or drawing of lots will be used if all criteria below fail.
*all current references in mlb.com website indicate that this rule applies even for teams that are not in the same division.
If two champions from separate divisions have the same record, the tiebreaking procedure listed above is used to determine postseason seeding. No additional games are played.
Tied teams are designated as A, B, C, and D. Choice for one of these designations is first given to the team winning the tie-breakers (listed below). While A is usually the "best" designation, there are some scenarios where C has a different path to the postseason. If a division title is up for grabs, then those divisional teams will select from the first designations (A, B,...).
On Day 1, A will host B and C will host D (if there is no fourth team, C will be considered to have won this game). Games on Day 2 may occur as follows:
The order in which teams pick their designations (A, B, C, D) will be determined by the following 5-step tie-breaking system. If there is a tie for both wild card and division title spots, then the first designations will match teams competing for their division title.
If at any given step some, but not all, teams remain tied, then those teams that are still tied revert to Step 1.