Something I've been wondering for quite a while.

[xiphias]

Okay. Baseball. There are some basic, fundamental things I don't understand.

Within a game, I pretty well understand how things work. But I don't understand, entirely, how teams are ranked. How can someone be X and a half games back -- baseball doesn't have ties? And how does the wildcard race work?

Can anyone help?

Comments

[autographedcat.livejournal.com]

Sure.

The reason you sometimes have teams being something-and-a-half games back is that, while baseball doesn't have ties, teams haven't all played the same number of games at any given moment. By the time the season ends, everyone will have played in 162 games, but at any given day in the season, one team might have played 144 games while another has played 145 or 146.

Games back is a construction which indicates how many games a team needs to win to catch up with the first place team, assuming the first place team loses all those games. Let's say that the Yankees are 3 games up on the Red Sox. If Boston wins a game and the Yankees lose, then Boston picks up one game and are two games back. If Boston loses and the Yankees lose, it stays the same, three games back. But if Boston wins and the Yankees are off that day, Boston picks up a half game. Like Schrodinger's cat, the other half will resolve itself when the Yankees play again and either win or lose.

The wildcard is simply the second place team with the best record from the three divisions in each league. So you remove the first place teams, which get a playoff spot automatically, take all the teams left, and rank them by record. Whoever is on top of that list gets the final playoff bearth.

Hope that helps. :)

[mattblum.livejournal.com]

That's a great analysis. I would just add three things:

First, sometimes teams don't play all 162 games in a season, because the powers-that-be (i.e., the Commissioner's office) can decide that a rainout doesn't need to be made up if it can't affect playoff standings.

Second, I think the half-game thing is easier to figure out if you think of every game a team wins as gaining a half-game in the standings, and every game it loses as losing a half-game in the standings. That's why, yesterday, when the Yankees won two games (in a double-header vs. the Devil Rays) and the Red Sox, alas, lost one to the Mariners, the Yankees gained 1.5 games on the Sox.

Third, the wildcard thing can get a lot more complicated if two or more teams have the same record. This article has a much better analysis than I could write, though keep in mind the records quoted are from last season.

[(Anonymous)]

OK, no one's actually shown an example of how the games behind bit is done. So, let's start with a simple, hopeful, example where the number of wins is followed by the number of losses:

Boston 100 62
New York 90 72

Very simple, since both teams have played the same number of games; New York is 10 games back of Boston, since to catch up, NY would have to go 10-0 and Boston 0-10...or any other combination where over the same number of games NY won 10 more than Boston.

Boston 20 10
New York 15 13

More complicated, because Boston's played 30 games and New York only 28. Here, you take the difference in wins (5), the difference in losses (3), and average them to get NY being 4 games back. On the other hand, particularly later in the season, what you'll hear in this case might be "NY is 3 games back in the loss column". Since both teams will eventually play the same number of games (barring non-makeups due to it just not mattering for the playoffs), for NY to catch up, Boston has to lose 3 more times, regardless of what NY does, for there to be even the possibility of them finishing in a tie.

Boston 20 10
New York 22 13

Again, you average 'em, but in this case since NY has both more wins *and* more losses, you're averaging +2 and -3 for -.5, putting NY a half game back of Boston (note that NY's win percentage is .629, while Boston's is .666; Boston only has to go 2-3 for a .400 percentage, lower than their current percentage, to be tied with NY after the same number of games, so they're playing better so far and are ranked above NY despite NY having more wins).

tyg

[mattblum.livejournal.com]

My suggestion of thinking of every win as gaining a half-game and every loss as losing a half-game works for these situations. In the last one you mentioned:

Boston 20 10
New York 22 13

That means Boston is (20 * .5) - (10 * .5) = 5 games up in the standings versus the rest of the division, and New York is (22 * 0.5) - (13 * .5) = 4.5 games up. This makes it very clear that Boston is up by a half-game in that situation.

[pocketnaomi.livejournal.com]

Not all teams have played the same number of games on the same day, because of scheduling. If team A has won 12 and lost 6 and team B has won 12 and lost 7, because they've played one more game than team A, team B is half a game behind team A.

Wildcard race: There are three divisions per league. There are four slots in the playoffs per league. Those four slots go to the three teams which win their divisions, plus the one team which has the best record of all the teams which did *not* win a division. That's the wildcard.