Draws?

I think you'll find that draws don't count at all. So strictly speaking, the Chunichi and Hiroshima WIN% should be ---, not .000.

I've wondered about how they calculate draws. Say if your wining % is .500. Then your team ties. Does this affect the winning %? There have been games in the past where the team only needed to tie to clinch the series.

Yes - I'm a bit confused by this. On this site you have Hiroshima as 2.5 games back and Giants/Yokohama as 3.0 back but above Hiroshima. Chunichi are 0.5 games back so in 3rd.

On the Yahoo site, Hiroshima are 3.0 back (the same as the other two losing teams), but they have Chunichi in 3rd, 0.5 back, because of the draw I presume - doesn't seem logical to me.

That is odd. I thought it was odd after the first day, but figured that NPB BIS must have had some reason for arranging the standings that way. (I'm just translating the standings from NPB BIS.)

Ah, I think I know what's happening. When programs are written for sorting things, the data is sorted according to particular fields. In this case:

• The primary sort key is winning percentage
• The secondary sort key is wins
• The third sort key is the order that the teams finished the year before

So, the three top teams and three bottom teams each have the same winning percentage (1.000 and 0.000 respectively). That arranges the top and bottom three.

Then the top two teams have 3 wins each, so they're on top, arranged in the order that they finished last season (Hanshin then Yakult). The third 1.000 team (Chunichi) follows.

Finally, the bottom three teams cannot be sorted by wins, as they all three have 0. So they're arranged in the order that they finished last season. Games Behind would be a much better third sort key, but it looks like their programmers didn't think about what happens at the beginning of the season. Once each of the teams gets a win under their belt, though, this problem will go away.

Anyway, the formula used for winning percentage is:

wpct = wins/(wins+losses)

For the bottom three teams in the Central League right now, that's infinity since one is dividing by zero. They just shorten infinity as .000.

As for the impact that a tie has, it does allow for a team winning the league with less wins than the second (or even third) place team. This is due to the lower denominator. But it ties don't always help, and the victor rarely has less wins than the second place team. A win will still help out more than a tie.

Several years ago they counted a tie as .5 wins. That confused too many people, so they abandoned that fairly quickly. They also made it so that the team with the most wins would win the season and show higher in the standings one year. But with some teams having more rain outs than others, the second place team ended up having the magic number, causing all kinds of confusion.

Many more years ago, the Central League played to 15 innings instead of the current 12 innings. With those extra three innings, ties were very rare. But they are all too common with the current 12 inning rule.