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

[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.