The Snowball Effect

The Stolen Credentials

The successful Season 11 run at the Hellmouth Cup by the Ft. Worth Piano Tuners is the thing that keeps E Division auditors awake at night. The Tuners’ path to the Cup began with a grotesque 3-way tiebreaker for the Wild Card. The wild card tiebreaker only occurs when there are more teams than wild card spots - usually 2 teams and 1 wild card spot. In this case, it was 3 teams: Ft. Worth Piano Tuners , Long Beach Flightless Birds , and Jersey OSHA Violations . According to the rules, the tiebreaker win goes to the team that scored the most points over the course of the season. But the point totals for Season 11 show a terrible mistake: the Flightless Birds, finishing the season with 7,069 points, lost the tiebreaker - and the Piano Tuners, finishing the season with 6,607 points, advanced to the Division Series.

Rank	Team	League	W-L	Points Scored	Points Allowed
1	Atlanta Glitter Sharks	Hot	31-18	7,544	5,802
2	Orlando Business Majors	Hot	31-18	7,006	6,396
3	Elko Astronauts	Cold	30-19	7,513	5,850
4	Baltimore Texas	Cold	29-20	7,531	6,271
5	Seattle Sneakers	Cold	25-24	6,754	6,396
6	Long Beach Flightless Birds	Cold	24-25	7,069	7,175
7	Alewife Arsonists	Hot	24-25	6,832	6,886
8	Sacramento Boot Lickers	Hot	24-25	6,804	6,757
9	Ft. Worth Piano Tuners	Cold	24-25	6,607	6,586
10	Detroit Grape Chews	Hot	24-25	6,484	6,530
11	Jersey OSHA Violations	Cold	24-25	6,309	6,676
12	Delaware Corporate Shells	Hot	23-26	6,796	6,295
13	San Francisco Boat Shoes	Hot	21-28	5,843	7,323
14	San Diego Balloon Animals	Cold	20-29	6,088	7,436
15	Tucson Butchers	Cold	20-29	5,892	7,373
16	Milwaukee Flamingos	Hot	18-31	6,487	7,807

The Long Beach Flightless Birds were understandably outraged by the flawed tiebreaker decisions, but tiebreakers were not subject to review, and the Commissioner's Office issued no statement on the matter, which left the Ft. Worth Piano Tuners free to advance to the postseason on stolen credentials.

The Tiebreaker Mistake Snowballs

As word of the Ft. Worth Piano Tuners ' stolen postseason spot spread throughout different Golly fan bases, their Season 11 postseason run continued to attract greater scrutiny and criticism. In Game 1 of the Division Series against the #1 seeded Elko Astronauts , the match went just 1,006 generations - only 6 generations more than the bare minimum mandated by the league. It was borderline unimaginable that the Party Animals could pull off such an upset against a #1 seed that no one believed the Tuners would go all the way. The Tuners established a microscopic, barely-stable tub pattern, the Astronauts were called on a technical foul before they could even launch their first spaceship, and the match was over before fans had even reached their seats. Everyone was mad - fans, team collectives, concession stands, even the Commissioner - everyone except the Piano Tuners. This only served to fuel their hubris.

When the Piano Tuners defeated the Seattle Sneakers 3 games to 1 and clinched the Cold League pennant, many people expected a repeat of the Piano Tuners' Season 7 Cup series flameout. But when the Piano Tuners snuffed out the Alewife Arsonists 4 games to 1, clinching the Hellmouth Cup for Ft. Worth, the entire league was stunned. Somehow, a middle-of-the-pack team that never should have been in the postseason to begin with had turned a bug in the tiebreaker code into an improbable run for the Cup, poking their opponents in the eye, defying the league's low expectations and low opinions of them, and humiliating the Commissioner and E Division in one fell swoop. The tiebreaker mistake that snowballed into a stolen Cup blew a hole in the notion of a benevolent Commissioner.