One rainy night at Fenway Park in 2009, I committed the most egregious sin that a true baseball fan can ever make: I left the ballpark early. It was so muggy that night, it was nearly drizzling as I walked to the Kenmore T stop to hop onto the subway so I could take the last commuter rail at North Station. The Sox were down going into the top of the ninth, and I had a train to catch.

They came back and won the game in the ninth. If I recall correctly, Daniel Bard was credited with the win. It was a pleasant surprise. I wasn’t overjoyed, but generally happy and a bit sad that I couldn’t have stayed to see the win in person. Had they lost, I would have been slightly disappointed. Had the skies opened, pouring rain down onto the already waning crowd, ending the game an inning short, a similar mild disappointment to a regular loss would have followed.

Rainouts are a necessary evil in baseball, one with which fans are intimately familiar. A rainout still stings, especially when teams have been known to comeback in the latter innings, but the expectation is set with fans from the moment they enter the ballpark, or tune into the game elsewhere. There were 162 games that season, and this one wouldn’t have mattered in the grand scheme of things. That season, the Sox finished eight games behind the New York Yankees and qualifying for the postseason via a wildcard spot.

Today in the 2018 North American League of Legends Championship Series Summer, Clutch Gaming faced Echo Fox in the fourth match of the day. The game server crashed at 32:26. Echo Fox was well in the lead over Clutch Gaming, with a 10K gold advantage and seven turrets to Clutch’s zero. Riot Games officials awarded Echo Fox the game. Clutch Gaming found themselves in a similar situation to a losing team in a Major League Baseball rainout. If it had rained at the Sox game I was at, Boston would have been rewarded with an automatic loss since they were down going into the ninth. One loss of 162 games, 0.6 percent of the season, would have been decided due to rain.

One loss of 18 total games, six percent of the total season, is a completely different story. In the NA LCS, one loss can far more easily make the difference between a postseason berth, or failing to qualify for the playoffs at all. The stakes are higher with every game, especially since the NA LCS moved back to best-of-ones. At the end of last spring alone, the NA LCS had five tiebreakers to decide playoff seeding. In previous best-of-one seasons, tiebreakers have been played to decide whether a team makes it into playoffs. Imagine if, come the end of the season, this decision affects whether Clutch Gaming qualifies for playoffs or a tiebreaker.

Generally, the expectation for the NA LCS is that the game will either be remade entirely, or a “chronobreak” will be performed, returning to the in-game state just before the crash. In the case of the Clutch Gaming/Echo Fox series, a chronobreak could not be done, and the referees decided that the Echo Fox gold and turret leads were insurmountable for Clutch Gaming to overcome.

I could provide a list of games where other teams have come back from similar gold deficits or point out how Clutch Gaming’s composition had all of the tools to come back in this game. But this isn’t really the point. It’s a bad situation all around. Remaking the game is certainly to Echo Fox’s disadvantage and Clutch Gaming’s advantage. Calling the game like Riot Games eventually did is certainly to Clutch Gaming’s disadvantage and Echo Fox’s advantage. There’s little consistency with these rules — a similar situation arose in a Giants! Gaming/Vitality series in the European League of Legends Championship Series and that game was eventually remade — leaving the fate of teams in the hands of the human referees who happen to be stuck with making the awful decision that day.

A cursory look at the NA LCS Rulebook, which is available to the public, shows the Awarded Game Victory ruleset, which comes with its own series of criteria which may or may not be applied by referees in the process of awarding a game victory to one team. In the case of Clutch Gaming/Echo Fox, none of the criteria applied, yet the game was awarded to Echo Fox anyway. This isn’t against the rules, but the open nature of the wording — “League Officials may, but are not required to, use any or all of the following criteria in the determination that one team cannot

avoid defeat to a degree of reasonable certainty” — leaves a bad taste in viewers’ mouths. A lot of this has to do with expectations. Human error is something that baseball fans, players, coaches, and managers loathe, but come to accept. It’s a part of the game, just as watching a coach or manager stomp around the base paths, yell at an umpire, and subsequently get ejected over protesting a bad call is another part of the game. I’m not suggesting that Clutch Gaming staff members should have stormed the stage in anger, I’m simply pointing out the difference in expectations.

Less than 24 hours before the Clutch Gaming/Echo Fox game, Snake Esports faced Team WE in WE’s new Xi’an stadium and an Ornn bug caused a similar situation that eventually led to a remake. That game was much closer (1K gold lead for Snake and 1-1 in turrets) but the frequency of these bugs is alarming. Every professional League of Legends team is aware that bugs can happen, and is likely, albeit vaguely, aware of this particular rule that can award victory to one team in case chronobreak cannot be performed. Yet, if I was a team owner, even if my team has nothing to do with this particular ruling or any other ruling, I’d be alarmed that my postseason hopes could be so easily out of my team’s control. The purpose of writing this isn’t to rip into Riot for making the wrong call or the right call. It’s a bad decision for anyone to have to make. But no team should have to feel the loss of agency that Clutch Gaming likely felt today.

The inaugural franchising season in North America was going to have it’s bumps in the road, but this is one bump that should be smoothed over as much as possible for the future. More precise language in the ruleset would be an easy starting point, and meeting with the franchise owners to quickly address this should also be of utmost priority. Set more concrete rules with more consistent decision-making from game to game, and expectations will follow.