MLB Baseball Standings

The first place some Major League Baseball fans look to when they want to check the progress of their favorite team is the MLB Standings page. You can find standings pages all over the internet, in your local newspaper, and even on the scoreboard when at a live game.

The standings show you how your team has been doing throughout the season and of course they can get pretty interesting come September. Hopefully we will be able to provide real-time MLB standings on this page soon enough here at Picks.org.

MLB Standings Symbols (W, L, PCT, GB and Last 10)

In the standings portion you will typically see these categories: “W”, “L”, “PCT” ,”GB” and Last 10. There are several other statistics that you may find under a MLB standings page, but most, if not all will have these categories.

In the MLB Baseball Standings page, the “W” stands for “wins.” This is a pretty easy category. If your team wins a game, they get to mark a spot in the “W” column. The same goes for the letter “L”. “L” is a loss, and in the world of Major League Baseball, teams will suffer through many losses in a season. Even the best teams will lose up to 60 times if not more in a season.

The next category is percentage, or “PCT.” To get the percentage, you would take the amount of wins, and divide by the number of total games played, and that is your percentage. For example a 6-4 record, would merit a .600 percentage. If you were 42-47, you would have a .449 winning percentage. Usually a divisional winner will be around .600, but sometimes a division is poor and the winner hovers around .500.

The next category is the games behind (also “GB”). This is an important category, because it shows how far back your team is from first place. To get how many games your team is behind the first plce team here is what you need to do: Take your teams wins, and subtract that number from first place wins. Then do the same for losses, except your team will most likely have more losses than first place.

Add those two numbers and divide by 2 – boom, thats how many games back they are. So for example: 56-44 for first place and 51-49 for your team. The difference in wins is five, and losses is five, so that totals ten, divided by 2 is five. Your team is five games back. When you play an uneven amount of games, it moves to .5’s, which is a half game. The last category is their record in the “last ten games,” this just is shown to see how the team has been doing as of late.

Number of Divisions and Playoffs

MLB Standings are fun to look at. They are also important because the winners of the divisions make the playoffs. Both the National League and the American League have three divisions; NL East, NL Central, NL West… AL East, AL Central and AL West.

Winners of these three divisions, along with a wildcard team from each league make the playoffs. However, new MLB rules have allowed for an additional wildcard team to emerge from the AL and NL, who actually face the other wildcard team in a “play-in” game to determine the 4th playoff team.