"Massive Tie Scenario"

One of my favorite parts of the stretch run has been the enthusiasm about the potential for a multiple team tie. All of these brilliant baseball writers (the BP guys and Baseball Musings in particular) are absolutely giddy about the fact that it might take three extra days to decide the NL playoff participants. To his credit, David Pinto from Baseball Musings has been all over this from the beginning; his first "Massive Tie" post was all the way back on September 5th, and he's given an update pretty much every day since.

BP's Clay Davenport, creator of the Playoff Odds Report, has started giving live updates as games end. After last night, he calculated the odds of a four-team tie at 1 in 8, or 12.5%.

The thing about the Playoff Odds report is it doesn't take each day's starting pitchers into account. This doesn't matter at all over any significant period of time, but obviously plays a big role in our current situation. Because of this, I thought I'd look at the Vegas lines for each game, and see what number I get for the massive tie scenario.

FLA (Willis) @ NYM (Glavine, -210)
WAS (Bergmann) @ PHI (Moyer, -230)
SD (Tomko) @ MIL (Suppan, -111)
ARI (Petit) @ COL (Jimenez, -230)

All four necessary individual results are more likely than not, three of them significantly so. The translated percentage chances of each of these outcomes (after adjusting the line to take out the house advantage) are 67.7%, 69.7%, 52.6%, and 79.7%, respectively.

Multiply those four numbers together, and we get a 17.3% chance of a four-team tie, a little better than 1 in 6. If you parlayed these four events, the bet would be risking $10 to win $44.80.

Related: Should the Diamondbacks Lose?

Update: The Mets (Glavine in particular) are doing their best to ruin everything.