We wake up this Monday morning with both Florida teams in first place.

With the Phillies staging a huge comeback to defeat the Nationals and the White Sox squeaking by the Indians, who had Kansas City as the last undefeated team?

The AL Central holds a nice lesson in how standings are calculated today. The Tigers, Twins and Indians all own the same winning percentage, .667, but the Indians are listed as 1/2 game behind the other two. Which is right? Winning percentage is the appropriate way to rank teams as 1st or tied for 1st. WPCT is a window into the long term probability of teams winning. Games behind is a measure of the difference in games over .500 (1/2 the difference actually). So if the Indians were to play three games to catch up to the same total as Detroit and Minnesota, and won two out of three, the teams would be tied. The winning percentage wouldn't change, but the games back would. In extreme case, the team in first place can actually be games behind the second place team!

Matthew Swarner asked for your predictions on how the divisions would play out in 2007. He gather those plus ones he found on the web and counted the votes. He weighted the vote by the position, so a first place vote was worth 1, second 2, and so forth. Lowest total wins the division. Here's the voting and the predicted order of finish.

The rest after the jump.

Michael Martin pointed me to Cool Standings today, a site that breaks down major league baseball standings in very interesting ways. The coolest things on this cool site are the columns representing probability of winning or making the playoffs. Check it out.

Early today, I said I'd try to look at how unusual is the Athletics comeback. The A's reached their low point at 49 games. They were 17-32, a .347 winning percentage. They are now at .565, a .218 point increase. Since 1974, I measured the biggest differences between a team's final winning percentage and it's winning percentage after 49 games.

This seems to be a specialty of the A's and Padres. It should be noted that if the Athletics and Astros can maintain their current winning percentages through the end of the year, they'd be 1 and 2 on this list.

I'm not sure this is the best way to do this study. Maybe I should compare winning percentage through 49 with winning percentage after. Let me know what you think, it's easy to figure differently.

The Devil Rays take three of four from New York and move into a tie for fourth in the AL East. The Yankees shakeup didn't work; losing three in a row to Tampa won't sit well with management. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

The standings this morning indicate that 29 of the 30 ML teams are within 2 1/2 games of first place today. This is very different from two years ago, when a number of teams got off to both fantastic and horrible starts, and the divisions had spread themselves out by this time.

And we have interesting teams in first place. The Toronto Blue Jays are on top of the AL East; the Brewers top the NL Central after beating up Pittsburgh, and the Washington Nationals are tied for first in the tight NL East.

The only club not keeping pace is Colorado. They've been outscored 60 to 36 and have their walks and strikeouts backwards. The pitchers have walked 48 and struck out 40. It's bad enough when an individual pitcher does this, but to have the whole staff in this situation is deplorable. Meanwhile, the batters have drawn 21 walks while striking out 53 times. And you can't blame Denver for the poor pitching; six of the eight games have been played on the road. It's going to be a long summer at Coors.

It's still early, and it's still close, but the AL East standings are inverted from 2004. Toronto is first instead of last, and the Yankees and Red Sox are bringing up the rear. The standings in the AL East have been static for so long, it's nice to see something different, even if it is early in the season.

Take a look at the American League standings today. Every team except the White Sox and Rangers is two and two. I can't remember seeing something like this before.

Of course, if these were really evenly matched, we'd expect a distribution of 3/8 2-2, 1/4 3-1, 1/4 1-3, and 1/16 4-0 and 1/16 0-4.

As a follow-up to this post, I find the Yankees in a very interesting position right now. The AL playoff hunt is resembling a bicycle race, in which the Red Sox are leading a pack that is trying to chase down a lone, lead rider. The Sox are out front, and the others are being towed along the Boston draft. Normally, the Yankees wouldn't be too worried about the Red Sox catching them since the Yankees would likely end up the wild card anyway. But with Oakland, Anaheim and Texas also in the hunt, it could end up that two or three teams catch the Yankees, and then it's a dog fight not just for the AL East, but for the playoffs as well. New York can't be too happy with what they see in their rear view mirror right now.

While I was having my own streak of not watching baseball games for almost a week, some major league teams have gone off on streaks of their own. The Boston Red Sox are now 5 1/2 games behind the Yankees, well within striking distance given that they have six contests between each other. The Red Sox have not lost two in a row starting on August 7. They have outscored their opponents during that time 134-86 (6.7-4.3 per game) to amass a 16-4 record. I find it interesting that the big trade was supposed to help the defense (which it did) which has allowed 4.7 runs per game overall this season. But the offense has really come alive, despite the fact that neither Mientkiewicz (.631 OPS) nor Cabrera (.759 OPS) has provided much offensively. I guess all those men the Sox were leaving on base earlier this year are coming around to score.

The Indians, after being on the verge of taking over the AL Central two weeks ago have been banished by the Twins to also ran status. Minnesota now has a commanding 7 game lead in the Central.

Out west in the AL, Oakland and Anaheim are each 9-1 over their last 10 games, with the Athletics holding on to a slim one-game margin. The Rangers are hangin in also, 2 1/2 back with a 7-3 record over their last 10. The Angels are actually on an 11-1 run, in which time they've scored 9 or more runs 5 times, including a 21-6 drubbing of KC. The A's run is 10-1, and they've pitched three shutouts in that time.

Over in the NL, the Braves have won 5 in a row to push their lead to 9 1/2 games and pretty much assure another NL East Crown. Meanwhile, the Cubs have put together an 8-2 run to inch them into the NL Wildcard lead. Nomar, it should be noted, has a .905 OPS in August and 11 extra-base hits.

There are streaks on the losing side, also. The Orioles have lost 11 in a row after being on an 11-2 run. Once again, they've fallen behind the Devil Rays in the race for third in the AL East. And the Brewers, who seemed like an up-and-coming team earlier in the season have fallen off the edge of the earth. The offense disappeared in July and has not been seen since. The pitching followed suit in August leaving the team 5-18 this month. It's a good thing they have such a great farm system on which to fall back on. Of course, this is the kind of performance Milwaukee fans have come to expect; a good start out of the gate followed by poor play the rest of the year, with the team doing nothing to correct the action mid-stream. Usually, it happens at the end of May, instead of July, however, so this was a banner year for the Brewers.

With Boston and the Chicago Cubs losing (what else is new) and Anaheim, Texas, San Francisco and San Diego winning, both leagues have a three way tie for the Wild Card! Never had so many teams been able to yell, "We're number two!"

The Giants are back in first place after an 11-5 win over the Dodgers. If this run had happened in September, we'd be talking about one of the great comebacks. But divisions are won as much in June (or April or May) as they are in September; it's just not clear when it happened until the season is over. The little used Deivi Cruz banged out five hits last night, including three doubles and is now hitting .326 in 95 AB. Durham and Tucker set the table with three hits apiece and scored four runs. Alfonzo knocked in six with two hits. and has 25 RBI in June after driving in only 18 in April and May. The pitching wasn't great, but it was good enough to win a high scoring game (something Cleveland didn't do last night).

At this point in the season, 21 of the 30 teams are in contention for the playoffs and in five of the six divisions, no more than 1 game separates 1st from 2nd. And no team is so far out that a nice winning streak wouldn't bring them back into contention.

This post from yesterday elicited requests for a better simulation. That's something I wanted to do also. So with the new simulation, you the user are able to set the number of teams, the number of games teams play against each other, and whether random intrinsic winning percentages are assigned (if not, every team is intrinsically .500). Just fill the the form and click enter. If you leave everything blank, you'll get the same simulation as yesterday.

I recently wrote this post about how, after about 45 games, we really couldn't tell if teams were good, bad or unlucky. Just to give you an interactive demonstration, I wrote a script to simulate a 45 game stretch. There are sixteen teams, and each team plays the other 15 three times. In each case, teams have an equal chance of winning. Hit the refesh button to run it over and over and see how, even equally matched, the standings spread out.

What does it mean to be a .500 team? Normally, we think of a .500 team as one that wins as many games as it loses, and that's certainly a good definition. But a .500 team could also be a team that had an intrinsic .500 winning percentage. That is, a team that was like a fair coin, as likely to win as to lose.

Now, when you flip a fair coin a number of times, it's not always going to come up heads and tails the same number of times. Sometimes, it's not even going to be close. If you flip a coin 45 times, probability predicts that 95% of the time, you will get between 16 and 28 heads.

When a team that's instriniscally .500 plays, the result of the games are like the flip of a coin. A win is heads, and a loss is tails. Now, most teams are about 45 games into the season, so we'd expect teams that are intrinsically .500 to have between 16 and 28 wins. As it turns out, all but three teams have between 16 and 28 wins! Does that mean that those 27 teams are intrinsically .500? No, but it does mean we can't tell. A team that is 16-29 could really be an unlucky team that is intrinsically .500.

It also means that if you set up 30 teams that are really evenly matched, you could get standings like the ones you'll read in the papers tomorrow morning by pure luck. That's why when you see a team like San Diego playing well, or a team like Seattle playing badly maybe there's been a change in talent, or maybe just a change in luck.

That's why, when I see a team like Detroit, that's playing better than it's intrinsic winning percentage, I'd like to see them build on the luck by actually improving the team.

I was just looking at the NL Standings, and noticed that one of the best teams, the Dodgers, has lost five in a row, and the worst team, the Expos, has won 4 in a row. It's a great race in the entire league this year, where even the lowly and homeless Expos are within striking distance of first place. The AL is much the same, although three teams have built big enough deficits that it will be difficult for them to overcome.

One month into the season, and sixteen teams are within 3 games of first place (or in first place). The Texas Rangers have the best record in baseball after sweeping the Boston Red Sox. Detroit, San Diego, Pittsburgh and Baltimore are all over .500. No team is running away with a division.

I've been scoring a lot of game this year, so I've been watching a lot of game closely, instead of flipping from here to there. And I've notice a lot of good baseball. Sure there is the occasional screw up, like the Giants using Hammonds in right field yesterday, where everything hit was just out of his reach, or Timo Perez taking an easy run to first on a single, and not being able to advance to second on a bobble. But for the most part, the major leaguers I see are playing hard, making the tough plays, making good pitches, running the base intelligently and all-in-all having fun playing the game. The season's been a real pleasure so far.

The season is about three weeks old (I guess I'm counting the first Monday as true opening day here), and what impresses me is how tight things are. It's common to have a team get off to a fantastic start and leave others in the dust, but that hasn't happened in any division. The biggest division lead right now belongs to the Dodgers; they lead San Diego by 2 1/2 games. The biggest deficit belongs to the Expos at 7.5 games. But there is no team that is so far out that they could not turn their season around with a good hot streak.

One big reason for these close races is that few teams appear to be doormats this year. The Reds, Brewers, Pirates, Padres, Rockies, Rangers, Tigers, Orioles and Devil Rays are not push overs this year. Even Kansas City, starting 6-11, has really just gone through a streak of bad luck, as they've only been outscored by five runs.

And what was that about 1/2 the teams not being able to make the playoffs? This was bud after the 2000 World Series:

''At the start of spring training, there no longer exists hope and faith for the fans of more than half our 30 clubs,'' Selig said. ''It is my job to restore hope and faith. I can assure you this system will be changed.''

I was wondering what would happen if there was a massive tie for the NL Central/Wild Card. That is, what would happen if you had a three way tie for the NL Central, and simultaneously have two or more clubs in the other divisions also tied with those three teams, and all of them tied for the wild card. I know if there are two teams tied for the division and one team tied with them for the wild card, the two division teams playoff, and the loser goes home. But this is different, since their has to be a three team single elimination tournament to decide the division winner. The rules do cover such a contingency.

What happens is that the division winner is decided first. Two of the teams play on day 1, and the winner plays the third team on day 2. The winner of day 2 is the division winner. At that point, the two teams that lost go back into the wild card pool, and you have a playoff with all those teams. The rules cover up to four teams, but can be easily extended to cover more. So the division losers would not be automatically eliminated from the post-season, as is the case of two teams tied for the division and another tied with them for the wild card.

The White Sox have picked an inopportune time to go into a slump. They've lost four in a row, which happens, but their two best pitchers, Loaiza and Colon just got hammered the last two games. They've missed a chance to gain ground on Kansas City, and have allowed the Twins to catch them.

Talk about Twins buzz, I just went over to Aaron's Baseball Blog and the Twins Geek, expecting to read about this team's great push toward first place. Nothing. You might think that this series was exciting enough for them to put up a rare weekend post. :-) But surely it's the big sports story in the Star Tribune? No! A Vikings exhibition loss is much more important than a baseball pennant race. The Pioneer Press isn't any better. Try to find the Twins headline on this page.

Okay, it hasn't been the greatest Twins season, but it's been a lot better than Detroit or Milwaukee. Tom Powers was ready to give up on them two days ago.

After a humiliating 8-3 loss to the Cleveland Indians on Thursday, Twins manager Ron Gardenhire cut short his postgame analysis. Angry at his team, his season and the world — in no particular order — Gardenhire announced he was "tired of *&%$ talking."

Good, because I'm tired of *&%$ listening.

I'm tired of hearing about the lack of leadership. I'm tired of hearing about the lack of enthusiasm. I'm tired of hearing about the dimwitted mistakes.

What I never hear are answers.

One of the few holdouts who still believed the Twins had a chance to turn around their season and win the American League Central Division, I am about to capitulate. This team apparently does not have the fortitude to be successful. It is too soft, too easily discouraged. It has no sense of urgency.

It's time for a mid-August reality check. These are not the lovable overachievers, the potential contraction victims, who stunned the baseball world in 2002. The 2003 Twins are underachievers, wallowing quietly in third place in a lousy division.

The AL Central may not have the best teams in the league, but it's division race has been a lot of fun, with more twists and turns than a steel roller coaster.

All the AL games are over, and not much has changed. All three Central teams won, the Yankees and Red Sox lost, and Seattle picked up a game on the A's. Rich Harden faced a tough offensive team and only went five after throwing 109 pitches. He allowed two runs, but the bullpen gave up three the rest of the way. The races stay tight.

The Red Sox came into today 1/2 game behind the Yankees, but tied in the All Freaking Important Loss Column. All my life I've heard, "You can make up the wins, but you can't make up the losses." Well the Red Sox just lost, so it strikes me that the Yankees just made up a loss. Not so?

Pedro went five good innings, striking out six but giving up six hits. The offense let him down this time, as he left with the score tied at 1. Old Red Sox closer Tom Gordon pitched the ninth for his first save of the year, and his first since 2001.

The Tigers are 15.5 games out of first place, but only 15 games out in the all-important loss column. :-)