Sports Illustrated Wild-Card Standings

MLB’s new expanded wild-card format ushers in complexities in roster decisions, scheduling, and tiebreaker rules. If your team is the current wild-card leader in its league, there’s also the issue of figuring out how far ahead you are in the playoffs race. The wild-card standings on the Sport Illustrated web site (see screen capture above for the National League) don’t always make it simple.

This year for the first time the top two teams in each league that aren’t division winners will make the playoffs. From 1994 through 2011 there was one wild-card team per league. The two wild-card teams in each league will meet in a one-game playoff with the winner joining the league’s three division winners in the division series.

In the Sports Illustrated wild-card standings, the two current leaders are shown at the top with the team with the best record listed first. GB numbers (games behind) are listed for the rest of the teams. A team is one game behind if it has one less victory and one more defeat than the team in front of it. GB is a measure of how much ground a team needs to make up to overtake the team ahead of it.

If the top two teams have identical records, determining how far ahead each one is of the rest of the pack is easy—it’s the GB number listed for the third team.

But if the top team has a better record than team two (like Atlanta and St. Louis right now), the Sports Illustrated standings are misleading. Atlanta does not hold a two-game lead over Los Angeles. It’s St. Louis that’s ahead by that margin. Atlanta is actually 6.5 games ahead of the Cardinals for the top spot (although this isn’t shown) and thus is 8.5 games up on the Dodgers.

Obviously Atlanta wants to finish as the top wild-card team and earn home-field advantage in the wild-card playoff game. (Even better, they would like to win the Eastern division over the Washington Nationals, but that seems unlikely at this point.) However, above all, they want to be in the playoffs to help make up for last year’s near miss. In as exciting a finish as you will likely ever see, St. Louis won the NL wild-card berth over the Braves on the last day of the season.

So you can understand why Braves fans need clear confirmation that they are actually up by 8.5 games with 12 to play (almost certainly a safe lead) on at least being the second wild-card team. A two-game lead at this point like St. Louis has over the Dodgers is a lot dicier.

The Sports Illustrated web site should make that clear.