Suspended Game

Definition

A suspended game is a game that is stopped early and must be completed at a later date from the point of termination, though not all terminated games become suspended games.

The most frequent cause of a suspended game is when a regulation game is terminated due to weather, and the game is either tied or in the midst of an inning in which the visiting team has taken the lead. Other rarer causes for suspended games include a technical malfunction in the stadium that prevents the game from continuing.

Prior to the 2020 season, if a regular season game was terminated early before becoming official, the results up to the point of the termination did not count and the game was started over at a later date. But as part of MLB's health and safety protocols during the COVID-19 pandemic, all games cut short before becoming official were resumed at a later date, rather than started over from scratch, during the 2020 campaign. This matched the rules that have been in place since 2008 for all postseason games and any tiebreaker games added to the end of the regular season.