The San Diego Padres won NL West division championship while the NL West 2nd place Los Angeles Dodgers took the NL wild card, although both the Dodgers and Padres ended the regular season with identical 88-74 records.

Yahoo sports reported;

San Diego earned its second straight division title and the Dodgers got the wild card because of the tiebreaker — the Padres went 13-5 against Los Angeles this season.

Tom Singer of MLB.com explains the divisional championship tie-breaker further;

Ties involving two teams from the same division already assured of postseason participation.

The first tie-breaker would be the head-to-head regular-season series between the teams to determine which club is the Division Champion and which club is the Wild Card.

Should three clubs finish the season with the same winning percentage, one of which as a division winner and the other as a Wild Card, playoff games would be played as follows:

• The two teams tied for the division lead play the one-game tie-breaker, with the winner being declared the division champion.

• The losing team in that game then play the club from the other division for the Wild Card.

For further background and clarification of rules regarding Major League Baseball Tie-breakers, click here.

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 2nd, 2006 at 5:40 pm and is filed under All Time Baseball Highlights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.