I don't think I'll make a regular series out of these, but I wanted to see how hard it would be to show games behind second place. Might as well share.

It appeared for most of 2006 that the Tigers and ChiSox were both going to the playoffs, the race was just for HFA. No teams from the other two divisions made a decent run at the Wild Card, so I'm basically thinking as second place in the ALC as a proxy for the WC-leading team.

The chart of games above second place shows that once the Twins started making their run, the Tigers held them off for a long time, but the ChiSox did not.


I'm not planning on doing this for 2011 because it's not looking too likely that the WC will come out of the ALC, and if that's the case, I need to at least double the number of teams that I've got in my database. That just takes too long.

Below are two graphs comparing 2006 to 2011 (by game number). First, by just games above and below .500, then this year's games behind first and 2006's games behind first and behind second. Enjoy!