On October 1, 2018, baseball played two tiebreakers on the same day for the first time. In the afternoon, the Milwaukee Brewers beat the Chicago Cubs, 3-1, at Wrigley Field. Later that day, the Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Colorado Rockies, 5-2, at Dodger Stadium. All four teams had already clinched a playoff spot. The games decided division titles, and the losers moved on to a wild-card game.

They turned out to be the last of their kind. In 2022, a new collective bargaining agreement expanded the postseason from 10 teams to 12 and replaced tiebreaker games with a formula. MLB said the compressed October schedule left no room on the calendar for an extra day, and that teams with first-round byes should not sit idle. Those reasons are sound. The price was a piece of baseball history that will never get another chapter.

Sixteen Chances
From 1946 through 2018, teams tied for a pennant, a division title or a wild-card berth played extra games to settle it. There were 16 tiebreakers, made up of 12 single games and four best-of-three series. The National League used series until 1969, while the American League always used one game.

The results counted as regular-season play, so every hit, run and strikeout went into the season totals. That is why the single games earned the nickname Game 163. Across the 22 games those tiebreakers required, the home team went 11-11.

The first came in 1946, when the St. Louis Cardinals and Brooklyn Dodgers both finished 96-58. The Cardinals won the series, two games to none, and then won the World Series. Some lists begin earlier, with the October 8, 1908, replay of the Merkle game between the Cubs and New York Giants. That game was the makeup of a contest ruled a tie, and official counts start in 1946.

The winners of the 16 tiebreakers went on to play in eight World Series. Four of them won: the 1946 Cardinals, the 1948 Cleveland Indians, the 1959 Los Angeles Dodgers and the 1978 New York Yankees.

The Pennant Playoffs
The 1948 American League playoff was the first in that league. Cleveland and the Boston Red Sox both finished 96-58 and met at Fenway Park on October 4. Boston manager Joe McCarthy started veteran right-hander Denny Galehouse, who is remembered in Boston mostly for that start. Cleveland's Lou Boudreau, the player-manager, went 4-for-4 with two home runs, and rookie knuckleballer Gene Bearden pitched a complete game on one day's rest in an 8-3 win.

Three years later, the Giants and Dodgers played the best known of all the tiebreakers. New York trailed Brooklyn by 13½ games in mid-August and won 37 of its final 44 to finish tied at 96-58. In the deciding game on October 3, 1951, the Dodgers led 4-1 entering the bottom of the ninth. Bobby Thomson's three-run homer off Ralph Branca won the pennant. The Polo Grounds crowd numbered 34,320, though tens of thousands more would later say they were there.

The 1959 Dodgers, by then in Los Angeles, swept the Milwaukee Braves in a two-game series that ended with a 6-5 win in 12 innings. Three years after that, the Giants and Dodgers met again. Los Angeles had held a four-game lead with eight to play. In Game 3, on October 3, 1962, the Dodgers led 4-2 entering the ninth, and the Giants scored four runs on two singles, four walks and an error. Jim Davenport's bases-loaded walk brought in the go-ahead run, and San Francisco won, 6-4.

The Division Era
The 1978 game is the one Boston cannot shake. The Red Sox led the Yankees by 11½ games at the All-Star break, and New York won six of seven head-to-head meetings in September. Both teams finished 99-63. At Fenway Park on October 2, Boston led 2-0 in the seventh inning. Bucky Dent, a shortstop with four home runs that season, sent a three-run shot over the Green Monster off Mike Torrez. The Yankees won, 5-4, after Goose Gossage got Carl Yastrzemski to pop up to third baseman Graig Nettles. That Yankees team remains the last to win a World Series after playing a tiebreaker.

In 1980, the Houston Astros lost their last three games to the Dodgers and needed a tiebreaker to win the franchise's first division title. Joe Niekro threw a six-hit complete game, and Art Howe drove in four runs in a 7-1 win at Dodger Stadium. It was Houston's first postseason trip in 19 years of existence.

Fifteen years later, the 1995 Seattle Mariners trailed the California Angels by 13 games on August 2. The strike had shortened the season to 144 games, so their tiebreaker was really Game 145. Randy Johnson struck out 12 in a three-hit complete game, and Seattle won, 9-1. The Mariners had never reached the postseason in 19 seasons, and the run that followed is widely credited with helping the city secure a new ballpark.

Others left marks of their own. Steve Trachsel carried a no-hitter into the seventh inning for the 1998 Cubs, who beat the San Francisco Giants, 5-3, at Wrigley Field. Al Leiter threw a two-hit shutout for the 1999 New York Mets, and David Price finished a 5-2 win for the 2013 Tampa Bay Rays.

In the Record Book
Because tiebreakers counted as regular-season games, they could decide individual honors. The 2007 game between the Rockies and San Diego Padres ran 13 innings at Coors Field. Colorado trailed 8-6 after Scott Hairston's two-run homer in the top of the 13th. The Rockies then scored three runs off Trevor Hoffman, who was the career saves leader at the time. Matt Holliday slid headfirst across the plate on Jamey Carroll's fly ball, and umpire Tim McClelland called him safe. Replays could not settle it. Colorado won, 9-8, and went on to the World Series.

Holliday finished the season with a .340 batting average, the National League title, and 137 RBIs, one more than Philadelphia's Ryan Howard. Two of those RBIs came in the tiebreaker.

The same held in 2018. Christian Yelich singled in his first three at-bats against the Cubs and won the batting title at .326. The final Game 163 belonged to Walker Buehler, who threw one-hit ball into the seventh inning as Cody Bellinger and Max Muncy homered in a 5-2 Dodgers win. It gave Los Angeles a sixth straight division title.

The Formula Arrives
The system that replaced Game 163 began with a coin flip. In 2008, the Chicago White Sox won a flip and hosted the Minnesota Twins, even though the Twins had the better season series. Jim Thome's seventh-inning homer produced the only run in a 1-0 win, and John Danks pitched eight innings of two-hit ball. Ken Griffey Jr. cut down Michael Cuddyer at the plate, and Brian Anderson's diving catch ended it. MLB then made head-to-head record the first criterion for home field in tiebreakers.

A year later, the Twins beat the Detroit Tigers in 12 innings at the Metrodome. Detroit had led by seven games in early September and by three with four to play, and no team had ever blown a lead that size that late. Alexi Casilla's single won it before 54,088 fans, in the last regular-season game the ballpark ever hosted.

Head-to-head record now runs the sport. Ties are broken first by the season series, then by record within the division, and on down a list. Applied to the 16 tiebreakers, the formula produces a strange result. In two, the season series was even. In the other 14, the winner had the better head-to-head record seven times and the worse record seven times.

Under today's rules, seven of those results would have gone the other way. The losers of the formula are the 1951 Giants, 1980 Astros, 1995 Mariners, 1999 Mets, 2008 White Sox, 2013 Rays and 2018 Brewers. Thomson's home run and Johnson's three-hitter would never have been played. Small samples drive the outcome, since the 2013 Rays and Rangers played seven times all year and Texas led the series, 4-3.

The formula also leaves teams no way to answer. In 2024, the Arizona Diamondbacks won 89 games and finished tied with the Mets and the Atlanta Braves, then lost the head-to-head tiebreaker to both. The Diamondbacks watched a Mets-Braves makeup doubleheader from Phoenix, needing either side to sweep. The teams split, and Arizona went home.

No 17th
As the 2026 season closes, any tie will be settled by arithmetic. None of this makes the change unreasonable, because a 12-team bracket needs a fixed calendar and a team with a bye should not wait on a coin-flip game. But baseball gave up something a spreadsheet cannot replace. Game 163 gave a season one more chance to matter.

The box scores of the 16 remain in the record books, and Thomson's home run, Dent's and Holliday's slide are still part of their seasons. There will be no 17th. Tens of thousands claimed a seat for the third game in 1951, and nobody will claim a seat for the next one.