Grrrrr. Standings

One of the real pains about this particular blog is posting the standings. Well, posting accurate standings.

I have three sets of standings in front of me that include the games of August 9, 1950. One is from AP. One is from UP. Another is from The Sporting News.

They're all different. In fact, Tacoma would like the UP standings as they're only trailing Yakima by two games instead of 2½ on the other two.

Standings can get out of whack easily and I've seen it happen with PCL standings on the wire when Vancouver was in that league. Wire services may end up shutting down for the night before all the games are in, so they'll send out a set of standings not including late games. Then, after the following evening's games, the editor starts adding based on the last standings compiled and may forget about the late game. So it gets missed, the standings are wrong, and the error isn't noticed for awhile.

This used to happen on occasion when Vancouver was in the PCL and I would call the wire editor and explain the error. Sometimes it would get fixed, sometimes it wouldn't (in fairness, the standings were not handled locally at the time; they were done at AP Seattle and United Press Canada in Toronto).

Thanks to the internet and computerisation, the official statistician's standings, linescores, box scores and so on go up on the web and can be found on all kinds of different sites. So I don't even bother checking the wire any more.

So, the gist of all this is I'm constantly checking and rechecking standings to make sure they're accurate. It seems they're not, more often or not, or at least have been wrong in the newspapers of July and August I've been looking at. It's taking up more time than I would like in getting the 1950 games completed.

Oh, if you're wondering, the correct standings of the three mentioned above, at least the ones the agree with my puny math skills, are the ones in The Sporting News, which come from Howe and would therefore be official.