Breaking Down a U.S.-Canada-Colombia Tiebreaker Nightmare

As of this writing, Mexico leads Canada 10-3 within the ninth inning of its ultimate pool stage recreation. If that consequence holds, Mexico will win World Baseball Traditional Pool C. (Replace: That consequence held.) This night, the U.S. will tackle Colombia to find out who advances because the second-place workforce within the group. If Crew USA wins, it’s easy: each the U.S. and Mexico will end 3-1, with Mexico advancing because the no. 1 seed by advantage of its head-to-head win on Sunday. If Colombia wins, it should end 2-2, as will the U.S. and Canada, with every workforce having a head-to-head win over one of many others. That throws issues to the WBC’s splendidly complicated runs-allowed-per-outs-recorded tiebreaker. Making issues extra sophisticated: As a result of the U.S. beat Canada by mercy rule, all three groups will end the group stage having recorded a distinct variety of outs. That makes the maths all of the extra sophisticated.

Luckily, I did it for you. There’s no assure the sport will truly go 9 full innings; along with the potential for additional innings, Colombia, the house workforce, might win in 9 innings however solely bat eight occasions, leaving the U.S. on 45 defensive outs within the related video games relatively than 48. However assuming the U.S. and Colombia every document 27 outs tonight, right here’s who would advance given a specific rating:

If Colombia beats the U.S. 7-4, these two groups would end with the identical run quotient. In that case, I’m not 100% certain what would occur. Both the tiebreakers would proceed down the road to earned run quotient in video games amongst tied groups (to date there have been no unearned runs), then batting common, then drawing of tons; or Colombia would advance by advantage of a head-to-head tiebreaker towards the U.S. The latter case would make extra sense, however the posted WBC guidelines make reference to “equivalent successful proportion,” which could preclude resetting the tiebreaker to solely embody two groups. So, uh, let’s simply hope it doesn’t come to that.

Michael is a author at FanGraphs. Beforehand, he was a employees author at The Ringer and D1Baseball, and his work has appeared at Grantland, Baseball Prospectus, The Atlantic, ESPN.com, and numerous ill-remembered Phillies blogs. Comply with him on Twitter, in case you should, @MichaelBaumann.