List of Major League Baseball tie-breakers

A tie-breaker is required in Major League Baseball (MLB) when two or more teams are tied at the end of the regular season for a playoff position including a pennant (prior to the introduction of the League Championship Series in 1969), a division title, or a wild card spot. Both the American (AL) and National Leagues (NL) currently use a one-game playoff format for tie-breakers, although the NL used a best-of-three series prior to 1969, when the leagues were split into divisions. Fourteen tie-breakers—ten single-game and four series—have been played in MLB history. In baseball statistics, tie-breaker games count as regular season games with all events in them counted towards regular season statistics. This can have implications on statistical races, such as when Matt Holliday won the batting average and runs batted in titles thanks in part to his performance in the 2007 tie-breaker. Home-field advantage for tie-breakers was determined by a coin flip through the 2008 season, after which performance-based criteria, such as head-to-head record of the tied teams, were put in place.

Although there have been no situations requiring a tie-breaker between more than two teams it is possible. In 2007, for example, the Philadelphia Phillies, New York Mets, San Diego Padres, Colorado Rockies, and Arizona Diamondbacks finished the season within two games of one another. The possibility existed for as many as four teams to be locked in a series of tie-breakers that year to decide the NL East, West, and Wild Card. Similarly, late in the 2012 season the possibility existed for the New York Yankees, Baltimore Orioles, and either the Texas Rangers or Oakland Athletics to all finish with the same record. This could have required the teams to play a complex set of multiple games to determine divisional and wild card winners, a situation which Jayson Stark described as potentially "baseball's worst scheduling nightmare."

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