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What is the magic number in baseball?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is the magic number in baseball?

Thanks,
Mike

— — —

Dear Mike,

The “magic number” is a calculation used to state how far a team is from achieving a goal. Most frequently, it’s a metric that show how close a team is to winning their regular season division or conference title, or to making the playoffs.

The term “magic number” is used in other sports as well as baseball, but these days, with the baseball playoffs quickly approaching, we’re seeing it most often in baseball news stories. Some recent examples are this article on The Detroit Sports Site which begins, “The Detroit Tigers’ Magic Number to clinch the AL Central stayed stuck on seven with Sunday’s loss in Kansas City.” or this article on SB Nation’s LA Dodgers blog, True Blue L.A., entitled, “MLB standings 2014: Dodgers and Giants both lose, magic number now 5.” There are websites devoted completely to following the magic number, like Playoff Magic. We’ll look at their Major League Baseball (MLB) section later. First, let’s talk about how the magic number works.

I find the easiest way of thinking about the magic number is that it is the number of games a team needs to win for them to achieve a goal no matter what another team does. This makes some intuitive sense. Let’s take a simple scenario. There are two games remaining in a season. My team, the Flywheels, is ahead of the Steampunks by two games in the standings. All I have to do is win a single game to make it impossible for the Steampunks to catch up. My magic number to end the season ahead of the Steampunks is therefore one. Let’s say though, that the Steampunks play one of their remaining games before our team, the Flywheels, does. If they lose, then they only have one game left and they are still down by two games in the standings. My magic number moves from one to zero. I don’t need to win any more games to assure myself that I’m going to finish the season ahead of my rivals. A team’s own result can change their magic number but so can another team’s win or loss. The magic number is a relative calculation.

In more complex situations, the magic number is harder to derive by instinct. Luckily, there are a few easy formulas to follow to calculate it. The best follows the logic of our previous example. It’s the second option on the Wikipedia entry about the magic number:

The magic number can also be calculated as WB + GRB – WA + 1, where

WB is the number of wins that Team B has in the season
GRB is the number of games remaining for Team B in the season
WA is the number of wins that Team A has in the season

This second formula basically says: Assume Team B wins every remaining game. Calculate how many games team A needs to win to surpass team B’s maximum total by 1.

Let’s use this formula on our example of the Flywheels and the Steampunks. We didn’t say how many games there had been in the season, only that there were two left. Let’s say it’s a 20 game season. The standings today look like this:

Team A: Flywheels – 12 wins, 6 losses, 2 games remaining
Team B: Steampunks – 10 wins, 8 losses, 2 games remaining

To calculate the Flywheel’s magic number, we take the number of wins the Steampunks have (10) add the number of games remaining for the Steampunks (2) subtract the number of wins that the Flywheels have (12) and add one to get… one! It works!

One important thing about the magic number that makes more sense when you see how it is calculated, is that it can only ever measure the distance between two teams. In a three way race for a division title, the leading team will have a magic number in comparison to each of the teams chasing them. If someone says that a team has a single magic number showing how far they are from achieving a goal, it’s safe to assume that every other team other than the one used to calculate that number has been mathematically eliminated from contention.

Returning to Playoff Magic’s MLB page, here’s one example of how the magic number is working in this year’s run to the baseball playoffs.

The AL or American League Central still has three teams in contention. The Tigers are in the lead with 86 wins after 155 games. The Royals are in second place with 84 wins after 154 games. The Cleveland Indians are running third with 81 wins after 155 games. There are 162 games in a baseball season, so the Tigers and Indians have seven games left while the Royals have eight. The magic number is most easily understood as how many games does a team need to win to stay ahead of the teams behind them even if they win every remaining game. If the Royals win all their remaining games, they’ll end the season with 92 wins. If the Indians win every remaining game, they’ll end the season with 88 wins. To end the season ahead of the Indians, the Tigers need to win a total of 89 games or three more than they have now. Tigers’ magic number vis-a-vis the Indians is three! To end the season ahead of the Royals, the Tigers would need 93 wins or seven more than they have now. Tigers’ magic number vis-a-vis the Royals is seven! Those magic numbers show up in the table on the Tigers’ row. The 5 on the Royals row in the Cleveland Indians column is the Royals magic number in relation to the Indians. In this case, the achievement is not winning the division but ending the season ahead of the Indians.

I hope that helps explain the magic number. In case you’re wondering what the GB means in the standings table, it stands for “games back.” Games back is another story completely but luckily, I wrote all about what “games back” means last year.

Thanks for the question,
Ezra Fischer

Cue Cards 9-18-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Wednesday, September 17

Another division has a winner in baseball — The Los Angeles Angels won their division, the American League West last night. When baseball teams win divisions, they sometimes celebrate in wacky, ritualistic ways that involve spraying champagne all over the place. The Angels did that last night but not too many people saw it in person because their definitively winning the division relied on the outcome of a rival team’s game and that game didn’t end until an hour after their game. So, the team waited in the locker room, watched their rival’s game on tv, and then, when it ended the way they needed it to, they “roared up the tunnel and onto their home field, goggles in place and champagne bottles in hand.”
Line: Did you know that this will be Mike Trout’s (excellent young player with a great name on the Angels) first time in the playoffs?
European Champions League soccer — The Champions League is the most prestigious club soccer tournament in Europe. It matches the best teams from all the domestic leagues, the English Premiere league, the Spanish La Liga, the Italian Serie A, the German Bundesliga, and so on. Even for a sports fan like myself who doesn’t follow European soccer closely, it’s exciting just for the novelty and the romance of seeing teams that normally only play opponents from within their country compete internationally. There were eight games yesterday. The biggest one was probably between English powerhouse Manchester City and perennial German Champions Bayern Munich. Munich won, 1-0. For sheer international mystique, it’s hard to beat Amsterdam’s Ajax playing Paris Saint-Germain or AS Roma vs. CSKA Moscow. The game with the best story was absolutely the 0-0 tie between the Spanish team Athletic Bilbao and Ukrainian Shakhtar Donetsk. There was a great New York Times story about Shakhtar Donetsk this past week. Donetsk, home town to the team, has been in an active war zone for the past six months, so the team has had to relocate to Kiev, where they are followed by a small but passionate group of fans. New York Times reporter James Montague caught one of these fans leaving a game. In place of a line for this, just relay this awesome story:

“This was the best day of the season!” said one fan, a 21-year-old finance student named Vladyslav, who declined to give his last name. He beamed as he left the stadium. “I don’t know how I’ll get home,” he said. “Maybe I’ll hitch a ride on a tank.”

Cue Cards 9-17-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Tuesday, September 16

Two divisions settled in baseball — Yesterday we mentioned that the baseball season is coming to an end soon. Just to prove the point, two of the six division winners in Major League Baseball (MLB) were conclusively settled last night. The Washington Nationals won their National League East division after beating the Atlanta Braves 3-0. The Nationals have now completed their three-year journey from surprisingly good to incredibly disappointing and now to living up to the expectations of being good. Their geographic neighbors, the Baltimore Orioles, also clinched their division after winning 8-2 over the Toronto Blue Jays. The Orioles are in the same division as two giants of baseball, the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, so division victories are hard to come by. Congratulations to both teams!
Line: Are you ready for the baseball playoffs? In case you don’t know how they work, here’s a Dear Sports Fan post explaining it.
Crime and punishment still reign over the NFL — The scandalous season of the National Football League (NFL) continued yesterday with three stories. In the Adrian Peterson story (arrested for child abuse in Texas for beating his four year-old child) the Vikings reversed course. After benching Peterson for a week, they had announced he would practice and play this week but then yesterday they changed their minds and re-benched him. Maybe it had something to do with a major sponsor dropping the team. Meanwhile, the NFL Players’ Association (NFLPA) is officially appealing Ray Rice’s suspension. When you think of it just from a labor/management perspective and look at the process, it is a pretty messed up process. First he was suspended for two games, then the league changed the rules about domestic abuse so that they called for a six game suspension for a first offense, and then a week or two after that, the league suspended him indefinitely and has still not put a time-frame on the suspension. It’s good that the players’ association is playing their role properly here, no matter how repugnant the crime is. In other policy-changing-after-the-fact news, the NFL and NFLPA is about to agree on more lenient punishment for drug violations which will retroactively lesson the punishment for 20 or so suspended players, including some high-profile ones like wide receiver Wes Welker of the Denver Broncos.
Line: So, lemme get this straight, Welker’s suspension gets shorter, Ray Rice’s is being appealed, and Adrian Peterson? After one day of practice, he’s “excused” from team functions again.

Cue Cards 9-16-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Monday, September 15

Eagles beat Colts, no one was arrested — The Monday night football game was between two teams that most everyone thinks are in the top third of the NFL. They played true to form by having a close, tightly contested, high scoring contest. The Eagles won, 30-27, moving to 2-0 (two wins, zero losses) while the Colts moved to 0-2.
Line: Did you know it’s the first time the Colts have lost two games in a row since Andrew Luck became their quarterback?
Rutgers apologizes for “classless fans” — Over the weekend, my alma mater, Rutgers, hosted their first ever Big Ten Conference game in football against what, geographically speaking, should be our new rivals, Penn State. Rutgers lost the game 13-10 but we upheld our reputation for vulgar behavior when some fans publicly and visually mocked Penn State for its recent sexual assault scandal. I can’t say I condone the behavior… but when I was at school there, we were way better at ceaselessly mocking the other team than we were at beating them in football.
Line: There’s been so many other scandals lately, Penn State’s issue feels antique in comparison.
Baseball’s checkered flag — In car racing, a checkered flag means ‘one more lap.’ Major League Baseball teams have about twelve games left in their 162 game season. Playoff races are in full swing (pun intended) and last night the first team clinched a playoff spot. That team was the Los Angeles Angels. The Kansas City Royals also helped their playoff cause by beating the White Sox in a “dramatic ninth-inning comeback.”
Line: Wow, the playoffs are coming up fast. I better start paying attention to baseball!

Cue Cards 9-11-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Wednesday, September 10

Spain upset by France — It sounds like the plot of a children’s book about regional food but it really happened yesterday in the FIBA Basketball World Cup. The host country, and co-favorite to win the entire tournament, Spain, was defeated 65-52 by France. This is a real shock, in part because France lost by 24 points to Spain earlier in the tournament. What to make of it? Well, for one, it means that the United States matchup against Spain in the championship game that was expected, won’t happen. Spain is eliminated. It’s a good reminder though, that if the gap between the rest of the world and the United States in terms of basketball wherewithal (that should be the name of a blog) is closing, then so too is the gap between the rest of the world and itself.
Line: I can’t believe Spain lost on their home court. And to neighboring France to boot! They must be so sad in Spain today.
Decade-long underdogs holding on — People often use the phrase “national pastime” to refer to baseball, but it must be said, given how little room on sports pages baseball is receiving, even as its regular season charges into tight playoff races, that it’s no longer our national sport. That said, the most compelling part of baseball season is upon us and a couple of long-suffering, long-pretty-bad franchises are desperately trying to hold onto playoff spots. Both won important games last night. The Pittsburgh Pirates beat in-state rival, Philadelphia Phillies, 6-3 and the Kansas City Royals shut out the Detroit Tigers 3-0. If the season ended now, both the Pirates and the Royals would make the playoffs.
Line: Baseball might not be the national pastime anymore but rooting for the underdog still is! Go Pirates and Royals!
The NFL’s Watergate Week continues — An AP story broke yesterday with the news that the NFL received a copy of the video from inside the elevator where Ray Rice assaulted his fiancee months ago. This only confirms my opinion that the question we should be asking NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is “what did he know and when did he know it.” Given yesterday’s news, it sounds more likely than ever that Goodell’s job is in jeopardy over this.
Line: Wow. Goodell’s got to resign or be fired.

Cue Cards 9-4-2014

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — September 3

Djokovic beats Murray — The most highly anticipated men’s tennis match yesterday was the nightcap of the U.S. Open between Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic. With a start time right around 10 p.m., there was the possibility of it lasting until 3 a.m. if it had gone into a fifth set competitively. Instead, after two very close sets which both went into tie-breaks, Murray seemed to fade because of hip and back pain and Djokovic won the final two sets by a wide margin. The two players have been playing each other since they were 13!
Line: “What a shame that Murray lost it physically because the first two sets were so close. I’m not sure anyone left can beat Djokovic.”
The two faces of baseball — Yesterday’s slate of baseball games had two great games on either side of the baseball spectrum. Both were competitive and close. One was a low-scoring “pitcher’s duel” and the other was a big-hitting “slugfest.” The Seattle Mariners beat the Oakland Athletics 2-1 in a matchup between great pitchers Felix Hernandez (Seattle) and Jon Lester (Oakland). The Washington Nationals beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in a game that needed extra innings over the normal nine because it was tied after nine. The game ended in the fourteenth inning after the Nationals scored three runs in that inning.
Line: “People love those high scoring baseball games but I really appreciate a well played defensive game like the one between Oakland and Seattle.
Here comes football — actual sporting events aside, the thing on most sports fans’ minds today is going to be the National Football Leagues season which starts tonight with a game between the defending champions, the Seattle Seahawks, and the Green Bay Packers. Seattle is expected to again have the best defense in the league while Green Bay is expected to have one of the best offenses. The NFL is the least predictable of the major sports leagues but this seems like it will be an exciting game.
Line: “Remember last year when the defending champion Baltimore Ravens got beat by the Denver Broncos 49 to 27? It could happen again… but I doubt it because Seattle’s defense is too good.”

Cue Cards 8-27-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Tuesday, August 26

Almost Perfect — A very rare and exciting thing in Baseball is a “Perfect Game.” This is when a pitcher pitches the entire game without allowing a single person from the other team to get to first base. Not even who! San Francisco Giants’ pitcher Madison Bumgarner had a perfect game through seven innings but allowed a hit in the eighth. No one else got on base though and that runner did not score. It was still an impressive and notable performance by Bumgarner.
Strong Little Fifteen — The U.S. Open’s opening round was enlivened yesterday when fifteen year-old CiCi Bellis from California beat the tenth ranked player in the world, Dominika Cibulkova. When told after the game that she was trending on twitter, Bellis said, “I know some of my friends were doing hashtag like ‘takedowncibulkova,’ something like that,” she said. “I know three of my friends did that.”
Sports as Soap Opera — Two interesting non-game-based sports stories developed further yesterday. One is heartening — Michael Sam, the first openly gay professional football player, made it through the first round of cuts on his team. Still, his team has to go from 75 players to 53 by this Sunday, so we’ll have another week of watching this story before things are settled. The other story is bizarre — a couple days ago, USC football player John Shaw hurtled into the news when he explained to his team that he had sprained both his ankles badly by jumping from a balcony onto concrete to save his nephew from drowning in a pool. As the story became big news, it also became… suspect. Now the story is that USC has started to back away slowly with its hands held up, gesturing to the world that they don’t know what happened and aren’t fully supporting Shaw until they know more.

Cue Cards 8-26-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Monday, August 25

Traditional Hegemony Trickling Back in Baseball? One of the unique and refreshing things about this season in Major League Baseball is that most of the traditional powers have been struggling and some teams that have been very bad for decades have been doing well. The two extreme examples have been the New York Yankees who are the winningest team ever but have not been good this year and the Kansas City Royals who have been one of the sorriest teams for the past thirty years but are doing great this season. Yesterday the two played each other and the Yankees won 8-1. This was their fifth win in a row and makes me wonder/worry if there’s enough time left in the incredibly long baseball season for things to turn back around.
The U.S. Open Begins — Big tennis tournaments usually start pretty quietly. There’s enough predictability in tennis and the tournaments are big enough that the first few rounds are usually pretty easy for the big names who get to play much less well known names. The most common story (until there is an upset) will be how some well-known player almost lost or, when that’s not possible, how the well-known player had to try harder than expected. In day one, Andy Murray had to try harder than expected against Robin Haase and Venus Williams had to try harder than expected against Kimiko Date-Krumm and an annoying bumble bee.
Rematch of British Titans — Last year’s English Premier League Champions, Manchester City, and Runners-Up, Liverpool, played yesterday afternoon. This might explains some funny furtive departures from the office in mid-afternoon and then more funny returns smelling slightly like ale. The defending champions trounced Liverpool 3-1 and from watching part of this game, I can tell you that it wasn’t even that close. Manchester City dominated almost as much as Germany did Brazil way back a few months ago. The English Premier League is fun to watch but mostly makes me miss the World Cup.

Basketball and Baseball Uniform Posters

One of my favorite professional experiences came several years back when I was working as a business analyst for Return Path. My boss back then, Jack Sinclair, found an Edward Tufte one-day course and decided to send me to it. Tufte is one of the foremost practicers, proponents, and gurus of data visualization, the art of showing information through graphics. One of Tufte’s favorite techniques is the use of small multiples. Small multiples are graphics that repeat the same basic frame over and over again in a single view to emphasize the differences. Think the frames of a flip-book but instead of flipping from one to another to deliver a message, you display them all at once.

A good example of this is Tufte’s reworking of an instructional display of air-craft marshaling signals, as reproduced by businessweek.com.

One of my favorite creative poster companies, Pop Chart Lab, has a couple of sports posters that use this principle of small multiples. They’re running a sale through August 29 on these and other charts. Use the code, “solongsummer” to get 15% off. My favorite is the visual compendium of baseball uniforms. This poster shows 121 tiny baseball uniforms from teams from 1869 through 2014. Each tiny uniform is a lens to an era. Baseball, with it’s rich cultural of historical respect and nostalgia lends itself perfectly to this treatment.

Also good is a similar visual compendium of basketball uniforms. The concept is the same and it still works. Basketball has a shorter history and doesn’t really share the timeless nostalgia of baseball. What it does have though is a strong fashion and pop-culture presence. Hidden among the professional jerseys of this poster are jerseys from movies like White Men Can’t Jump and He Got Game as well as jerseys designed for record companies like Bad Boy and No Limit Records.

Both posters are available for $35 before the 15% discount and are printed in my home borough of Queens. Get ’em while they’re hot!

Cue Cards: 8-25-14

Cue Cards is a series designed to assist with the common small talk about high-profile recent sporting events that is so omnipresent in the workplace, the bar, and other social settings.

Yesterday — Sunday, August 24

Sam Bradford’s Knee — St. Louis Rams Quarterback Sam Bradford tore his ACL and will miss the entire upcoming National Football League season. Bradford was the last quarterback drafted under the previous collective bargaining agreement when rookies made way more money than they do now, so, as upsetting as it is to lose your team’s starting quarterback before the season even starts for Rams fans, at least this means the team will definitely move on to a more affordable quarterback option next year.
Angels beat the Athletics — It’s rare that the two best teams in any sport are in the same division. In baseball right now, the two teams with the best records are not only in the same division but in the same state. The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (or whatever they’re actually called these days) beat the Oakland Athletics last night 9-4 to move into first place. Of all the major league sports, baseball has the fewest playoff teams, so this jockeying for position really does matter.
Sunderland ties Manchester United — The most famous team in the world, Manchester United, has a new manager this year, the way-out-there Dutch Louis Van Gaal. In two games so far this season, they still haven’t won with him at the helm. Yesterday they drew with the decidedly mediocre Sunderland. Let’s all just wait quietly for the Van Gaalian eruption to happen.