A Modest Proposal
This idea's been kicking around in the back of my head for a while. In the standings in your local newspaper or internet site, teams are always represented as being XX number of "games back". I don't quite know when this traditional way of calculating the standings started, or even if it orginated in baseball, but I do know it's sadly uninformative.
The main problem, of course, is that it's not really the number of "games back" a team is -- otherwise it would be a whole number. Differences in the wins and losses caused by teams having played an unequal number of games -- which is pretty standard for the entire season -- are resolved by the unhappy convention of the "half game". When teams get out of synch from one another by two or three or more games, even resolving the consequences of half games becomes difficult.
The way we baseball whackos resolve this, of course, is by looking at the AILC -- the All-Important-Loss-Column. This, after all, is ultimately what counts, since a team cannot "unlose" a game, but indeed can win "extra" games above and over the team that may be leading them by a half game in the standings that has played one or more games. This is why the AILC becomes the focus of pennant watchers in September, before the "magic number" watching takes over.
Now, all this standings-watching is complicated by the introduction of the wildcard. To show which team is ahead in the wildcard standings later in the season, many papers and on-line sources have resorted to having two sets of standings, one for the divisional races, and another abstracted list of the teams that are not division leaders but which are in contention for the wildcard, as if they were in yet-another-division. In addition to being a waste of column space, this "innovation" is also inaccurate when teams are vying for both a wildcard spot and a division crown, as happens pretty much every year in at least one division per league, sometimes all three. The team that might be a half game in the division lead ought to be represented as being a half game above the second place team in its same division that is represented as being in the lead of the separate wildcard standings.
My proposed solution to this minor problem of tablature is to dump "games behind" as the measure in the standings, and replace it with "games above or below .500". A team's record would be represented as, say, "+6" if it were six games above .500, "0" if it were, say, at exactly .500, and "-3" if it were three games below .500.
One objection might be that anybody can figure this out just by looking at wins and losses in the standings. True -- but doing this for every team in the league is tedious. The use of whole integers above or below .500 would allow one to glance through a single set of standings and quickly see not only who the divisional leaders are, but which teams are in the wildcard race simply by the number of games above .500.
Now, this does not do away with the problem of figuring out the relative chances of teams that have not played the same number of games. What it does do is get rid of that silly "half game".
I do have an idea for making the standings a little more obvious in this regard, but this is probably a bit too radical for most readers of the sports page. Wins and Losses are meaningless stats without knowing how many games are left. Now, as things stand, you add them together and subtract from 162, compare it all the other teams, and you have a range of games yet to be played -- and that may be won, thus avoiding adding to the All-Important Loss Column -- and a better idea of what each team has to do in order to win a playoff spot, in conjunction with my "Games Above .500" column.
Now, honestly, we don't actually need both wins and losses. Since the LC is AI, one ought to be able to simply rely on standings that were expressed as "losses" "Games to be Played" and "Games above .500", but somehow I don't think that would fly. Wins is nearly as informative if you also have "Games to Be Played" listed -- the wins would always count up, the "Games to Be Played" would always count down, and the "Games above .500" would show the relative balance.
That said, I don't expect many papers to drop one of either wins or losses, but you could shave off home and away records off some standings tables without much woe -- this is not, after all, primary information -- and add that "Games To Be Played" and "Games Above .500" first, wean the public to reading that, and then drop the silly "Games Behind" column a few years hence.
Once upon a time, papers didn't have extended box scores, featuring batting average and ERA or extended stats at the bottom. Frankly USA Today gets most of the credit for introducing extended box scores, back when the paper version of that organ was the best source for comprehensive box score information. Other papers have adopted this format, more or less, at least the papers that have serious sports sections. So while a lobbying effort for "Games Behind" might be a good thing, the only way I think changes in our basic box score format are going to happen are for one major organ to start using it, and for fans to react and become happy with the concept.
It is probably beyond the editorial resources of The Diamond Angle to have daily updated-standings in the new format, but I may try to get the discipline together to at least try a daily update in September. That way you regular TDA readers can see the idea in practice and decide if it's a good idea or not.
posted by The Crank 7:24 PM
