⚾ 1879 major league season

National League. No champion is recorded for this season. Boston Red Caps is top rated, at 1566.

8 teams · 23 weeks · through 1879-10-05 · Elo series by Neil Paine; era names, honours and brackets from MLB.xlsx

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The race

Elo rating by week. Higher is stronger; 1500 is average.

How this is measured

Elo moves after every game by how surprising the result was, with an adjustment for home field. One pool per season, so ratings compare across the whole league but not across eras.

Week 0 is the preseason seed, carried over from last season with a pull back toward average. It is an input to the season, not a result of it.

Red CapsGraysRedsWhite Stockings8 of 8 shown · tap or drag any point for that week · tap a line to lock it

Tap or drag on the chart: the nearest team's rating that week.

Final standings, Sun, 5 October 1879

full season
End of

1879 standings

Where every team stood on the date set above.

How this is measured

Grouped by league and division from 1969, by league before that, and by the league each club played in during the nineteenth century. W-L is the regular season as it stood on the date; the Playoffs column is blank for a team that was not in the postseason, which is not the same as 0-0. The Elo column keeps moving through October, so a team can climb after its regular season has ended. GB div is games behind the division leader on that date (the league leader before 1969), GB playoff the gap to the last playoff place from 1994, when the wild card began: the division lead or the last wild card, whichever is nearer. A team in a place shows it: Div 1 to Div 3 for the division leaders in seed order by record, or WC1 to WC3. One table per league, side by side on a wide screen. Wild cards go to the best non-leaders by winning percentage; a tie is settled by what happened in the end, not by the real tiebreak rules.

Final standings · Sun, 5 October 1879

NL · 59-25 .702 · Leads
1564
+85 yr
NL · 54-30 .643 · 5 GB
1566
-2 yr
NL · 46-32 .590 · 10 GB
1489
—
NL · 46-33 .582 · 10.5 GB
1495
-11 yr
NL · 43-37 .537 · 14 GB
1506
+25 yr
NL · 27-55 .329 · 31 GB
1414
—
NL · 22-48 .314 · 30 GB
1406
—
NL · 19-56 .253 · 35.5 GB
1390
—

The honours

Who won the title, the pennants and the divisions.

Best record in the league

Where these numbers come from

Weekly Elo ratings are Neil Paine’s MLB series. Era names, honours, records and brackets come from the project’s MLB workbook and refresh when it is updated. Baseball-Reference, 1879.