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

[(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.