The Colorado Rockies were part of a last in MLB … back in 2018

There will be a slew of changes coming to Major League Baseball (MLB) in 2022 and in the coming years. Most of the changes will be financial changes but there will be some gameplay and changes to the playoffs in 2022. For example, in 2022, there will be 12 playoff teams with six in each league.

The top two division winners will get byes in first round (the Wild Card round) and the lowest division winner and the three Wild Card teams will face each other in the Wild Card round.

However, something that has happened for decades in Major League Baseball that the Colorado Rockies have taken part in twice (in 2007 and 2018) is Game 163, which was a tiebreaker for two teams to either determine which team made it to the playoffs and which team went home or which team won their divison and which was a Wild Card team.

But in 2022 and beyond, Game 163 will not exist in MLB

Starting in 2022, a tiebreaking Game 163 will not exist in MLB. Instead, MLB teams will turn to an NFL-style playoff tiebreak rules so the team with the best overall record against each other will be the higher seed. If that doesn’t determine a winner, it will go by the record within the division and so on and so forth. For the Colorado Rockies, they played in two Game 163s in their short history.

In fact, unless rules change in the future, the Colorado Rockies will have participated in the final Game 163 in MLB history. On October 1, 2018, the Colorado Rockies faced the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 163 to determine the winner of the NL West. The winner would win the West and the loser would go on the road to face the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field.

The Rockies lost by a score of 5-2 but they defeated the Cubs by a score of 2-1 in 13 innings in the NL Wild Card Game.

That will be another change in 2022, as now, the Wild Card Round will be a best of three format.

The Rockies also played in a Game 163 in 2007 against the San Diego Padres at Coors Field to determine the winner of then-sole NL Wild Card spot. The Rockies defeated the Padres by a score of 9-8 in 13 innings. The Rockies eventually went on to the World Series.

Prior to Game 163s, tiebreakers used to be solved by three game series. The final three game series tiebreaker came in 1962 between the Dodgers and the Giants. 1962 NL MVP Maury Wills played in all 165 regular season games that year so that is one MLB record that will not be broken.

Since the Rockies started playing games in 1993, there have only been nine Game 163’s and the Rockies have played in two of them.

In each of those seasons, had there not been a Game 163, the exact result would have happened regardless (the Rockies had the better head-to-head record in 2007 and the worse head-to-head record in 2018).

However, losing Game 163 removes a rare element of intrigue and excitement for fans but can very easily be said that if a team misses out on the playoffs because of that, you had 162 games to win one more … and you didn’t.