MLB finally made a decision about the Mets/Marlins suspended game

Last week, while the last two National League wild card spots were still up for grabs, the Marlins, in contention for one of those spots, were facing the Mets in the last of a three-game series Thursday, September 28 at Citi Field.

The game went to the ninth inning with the Mets leading 1-0. With three outs to go, this happened in the top of the ninth:

Bryan De La Cruz singled leading off the ninth against Grant Hartwig and Garrett Hampson struck out. Chisholm greeted Anthony Kay with a double and scored on Gurriel’s pinch-hit single. Xavier Edwards flied out and Jon Berti singled Gurriel to second before the game was interrupted at 9:41 p.m.

They waited more than three hours, until nearly 1 a.m. ET, and then MLB suspended the game. If it would have had any impact on postseason spots, it would have been resumed at 1:10 p.m. ET Monday at Citi Field.

When the last two N.L. postseason spots were clinched by the Marlins and Diamondbacks, the Mets/Marlins game was not resumed. But it stayed in suspended-game limbo until late Wednesday, when this decision was made by Major League Baseball:

The New York Mets were awarded a 1-0 win over the Marlins in the game suspended by rain on Sept. 28, with Miami’s two-run rally in the ninth voided because the inning was not completed.

The game would have been resumed Monday had it impacted the postseason but was not because the Marlins were assured of the second NL wild card and Arizona the third.

Major League Baseball, after consulting the Elias Sports Bureau, said Wednesday the score reverted to 1-0 under 7.02 (b) (4) (A) of the Official Baseball Rules, which deals with suspended games.

“If one team is ahead, the team that is ahead shall be declared the winner (unless the game is called while an inning is in progress and before the inning is completed, and the visiting team has scored one or more runs to take the lead, and the home team has not retaken the lead, in which case the score upon the completion of the last full inning shall stand),” the rule states.

This was the correct call, made by the rules. Doing this also did not affect draft positioning. The Mets wind up with a 75-87 record, the eighth-worst in baseball, and 26 games worse than they finished in 2022.

The Marlins thus finish 84-78, the same record the Diamondbacks had, but the Marlins won the tiebreaker and thus played the Phillies instead of the Brewers. Perhaps they’d rather have had it the other way, as they wound up losing their wild-card series to Philadelphia, while the D-backs defeated the Brewers in theirs and moved on to a division series matchup against the Dodgers.

The Cubs finished 1-5 against the Marlins this year. You might ask this question: What if the Cubs had won one of the five games they had lost to Miami and thus also finished 84-78? If that had happened, then the Mets and Marlins would have had to finish the suspended game. If the Marlins had won in that circumstance, they’d have made the postseason anyway, via tiebreaker against the Cubs.

Here’s hoping for a better 2024 for the Chicago Cubs. And thanks to MLB for making the right call on the suspended game.