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. :)