MySQL Cookbook

Computing Team Standings

Problem

You want to compute team standings from their win-loss records, including the games-behind (GB) values.

Solution

Determine which team is in first place, then join that result to the original records.

Discussion

Standings for sports teams that compete against each other typically are ranked according to who has the best win-loss record, and the teams not in first place are assigned a "games-behind” value indicating how many games out of first place they are. This section shows how to calculate those values. The first example uses a table containing a single set of team records, to illustrate the logic of the calculations. The second example uses a table containing several sets of records; in this case, it’s necessary to use a join to perform the calculations independently for each group of teams.

Consider the following table, standings1, which contains a single set of baseball team records (they represent the final standings for the Northern League in the year 1902):

mysql> SELECT team, wins, losses FROM standings1
    -> ORDER BY wins-losses DESC;
+-------------+------+--------+
| team        | wins | losses |
+-------------+------+--------+
| Winnipeg    |   37 |     20 |
| Crookston   |   31 |     25 |
| Fargo       |   30 |     26 |
| Grand Forks |   28 |     26 |
| Devils Lake |   19 |     31 |
| Cavalier    |   15 |     32 |
+-------------+------+--------+

The records are sorted by the win-loss differential, which is how to place teams in order from first place to last place. But displays of team standings ...