Thorn: Round-robin baseball to solve a tie in 1964
From SABR member John Thorn at Our Game on October 15, 2014:
Here’s something new–at least I had never heard about it. Remember the National League pennant race of 1964? Phillies fans certainly do. On September 21, with 12 games left in their season, the Phils proceeded to lose 10 straight before finishing with two wins against the Cincinnati Reds who–had they won either–would have finished in a tie with the St. Louis Cardinals for the flag. The Cardinals defeated the Mets on the final day, however, to take the pennant by one game over both the Reds and Phils. Had the Mets won, the NL season would have ended in a three-way deadlock for first place.
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Never in the history of the game had there been more than a two-way tie, and that only in 1908, 1946, and 1951. The first of these had been resolved with a one-game playoff. Truly, that was not a playoff at all but a makeup game to cure the tie that had resulted from the Fred Merkle incident of September 23. By the time the Cardinals and Dodgers tied for the 1946 pennant, the established procedure in the NL was to stage a best of three game playoff. This was repeated in 1951. (The Dodgers lost both times.) Meanwhile, the American League elected to resolve its tied races with a one-game playoff; the first of these occurred in 1948.
But coming into the last days of the 1964 race, what would have happened if the Cardinals lost to the Mets and three clubs tied? No one knew, including myself, so I went digging. From a Tim Horgan article in the Boston Traveler of September 29, 1964, I saw that the NL had prepared for a three-way tie to be played off in a spectacularly messy round-robin style.
Read the full article here: http://ourgame.mlblogs.com/2014/10/15/round-robin-baseball/
Originally published: October 15, 2014. Last Updated: October 15, 2014.