How Not To Prevent a Tie

In 2002, the Major League Baseball All-Star Game ended in a tie. With the score at 7-7 through 11 innings, both the American and the National League teams discovered that they had run out of pitchers. They were only carrying eight pitchers per team; now the leagues each take more like 13 pitchers. In any event, people decided that this tie was a catastrophe, because apparently someone has to win everything. MLB Commissioner Bud Selig, therefore, came up with a way to prevent ties in the future: make the game count! The idea is that by tying home field advantage for the World Series to the result of the All-Star Game, there will be an extra incentive to avoid a tie. But can you spot the problem? Raising the stakes doesn't actually change what happens when each side runs out of pitchers. Literally not at all. If an All-Star Game goes 20 innings and all 13 pitchers on each side have gotten into the game, and the current pitchers are just plain finished, there's just nothing you can do. At some point the logic of a tie becomes inexorable; at some point a tie becomes necessary, no matter what the stakes. Now, expanding the rosters does a lot to reduce the chance of a tie, and I think it's very unlikely we'll ever see the kind of game necessary to exhaust that kind of pitching staff, but that has nothing to do with the "this time it counts" nonsense. It's a supposed mechanism to prevent ties that actually does nothing whatsoever toward that end.

Interestingly enough, the very next year there was another tie in a major exhibition event, the Presidents Cup. The Cup ended in a tie, with both the United States and the International teams winning 17 points. Tiger Woods had just defeated Ernie Els, the biggest International name, in a marquee match to avoid an outright loss of the Cup. The procedure for breaking the tie was that each team had placed one player's name in a sealed envelope, and in the event of a tie those envelopes would be opened and those two players would play sudden death until a winner had been determined. The designated champions were, of course, Tiger Woods and Ernie Els. And in some of the most compelling golf ever, as darkness crept over the Links Course at Fancourt, Woods and Els fought each other to a draw three times in a row. Three holes, all halved, and as the last light disappeared, still no result. So Captains Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player agreed to share the Cup for the next two years.

And when the two teams reconvened at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in 2005, there had been a rule change. Like the change to the All-Star Game, its purpose was to avoid a tie. If anything, though, it does even less to accomplish that goal. Traditionally at both the Presidents Cup and the older Ryder Cup between America and Europe, as well as all other less prominent international competitions modeled on the Ryder Cup, when a match was all square after 18 holes it was over. In an individual match-play tournament you would need sudden death at that point to determine who advanced to the next round, but at these international tournaments the match is simply halved, and each team received one-half of a point. The last match of the '03 Cup had been halved, with the Woods/Els match having been second to last. Accordingly (or something), it was decided that on the last day of the Presidents Cup, halved matches would not be tolerated until the Cup had been won. Until one side had at least 17.5 points clinched out of 34, any matches all square through 18 would go to sudden death. Indeed, Phil Mickelson thought he had sunk a putt to halve his match and clinch the '05 Cup, but was informed that he needed to go to sudden death instead. It was weird.

And it also doesn't do a bloody thing to avoid a tie. Well, conditionally it either does or doesn't. If the result of the first four sessions sends the Cup into the Sunday singles with a score involving half-points, say, 12.5 to 9.5 or something, the no-halved-matches policy will prevent a tie. But suppose the score entering Sunday is 11-all. And then suppose that in half the matches, American players win the first ten holes, and in the other half of the matches, International players do the same. Then we would just have 17 points for the United States and 17 points for the Internationals, and nothing about preventing individual matches from being halved would come within eight holes of relevance. There's just nothing about forcing each match to produce a whole point for one side or the other that in the slightest prevents those points from falling equally on each side. Nothing at all, unless, as I say, it would take a non-integer score on Sunday to achieve a 17/17 tie. Today, for instance, the score was something like 14 to 8 entering the singles competition. As I'm watching the tape-delayed broadcast the score is USA 17, INT 12, with five matches still on the course. If the Internationals sweep those matches, it's a tie, right? Would we do another Woods/Els battle to the death? (Okay maybe not with Tiger, his back has tightened up on him...) There's just nothing about the "no halved matches" rule that helps us if we wind up in a flat-footed tie based on whole points for each match. Half of the time, in other words, the rule will be if anything counterproductive for its stated ends, and at best useless. This anti-tie frenzy appears to just remove people's ability to understand the connection between policies and outcomes. Maybe we should just be okay with the idea that sometimes exhibition matches are tied.


Also, holy shit, Phil Mickelson just (on tape delay) hit a shot from the slope twenty yards right of the fairway that clipped the tree he was trying to bend it around, fell into the water, and skipped out of the water onto the bank! If the Cup ends up coming down to his match, wow, that'll have been one hell of a break.