Winning percentage, not points
Baseball tables are ordered by the proportion of games won rather than by a points total. The reason is scheduling: because of postponements and the sheer length of the season, two teams are rarely level on games played, and a raw win count would rank a team that has played more games above one that has been better.
There are no draws to complicate this. A game continues until someone wins, so every result is a win for one side and a loss for the other, and the percentage is a clean description of performance to date.
Games back and half-games
The games-back column measures distance from the leader. It combines the gap in wins and the gap in losses and divides by two, which is why half-games appear. A team one and a half games behind can close the gap entirely by winning while the leader loses, twice.
Half-games are not an oddity to be smoothed over; they carry real information about how many games each team has left. A team half a game behind with a game in hand is, in practical terms, level, and reading the column without checking games played is the most common mistake made with a baseball table.
Late in the season, attention shifts from games back to the magic number: the combined total of a leader's wins and a chaser's losses required to make the race mathematically over. It counts down toward zero and is the cleanest way to see how close a division is to being decided.
Wild cards and tiebreakers
Alongside the division tables sits a wild-card standing, which ranks every non-leading team in the league against each other. It is where most of the September drama lives, because it puts teams from different divisions in direct competition without them ever playing each other.
Ties for a playoff place are resolved by criteria rather than by an extra game: head-to-head record between the tied teams comes first, followed by records within the division and against common opponents. Removing the winner-takes-all tiebreaker game was unpopular with romantics and sensible for a sport that had run out of calendar.
Reading all of this together, the honest summary of a baseball table is that it is close to a fair ranking. With this many games, luck largely cancels out, and the team at the top in late September is usually the team that deserves to be there — which makes what the postseason then does to that ranking all the more striking.