⚾ 1961 MLB season
New York Yankees won the title. They also finished top rated, at 1595.
18 teams · 27 weeks · through 1961-10-15 · Elo series by Neil Paine; era names, honours and brackets from MLB.xlsx
Jump to any season1876–2026
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.
Tap or drag on the chart: the nearest team's rating that week.
Final standings, Sun, 15 October 1961
full season1961 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, 15 October 1961
American League
National League
1961 postseason
Every series, round by round, earliest on the left.
How this is measured
The field and the number of rounds have changed repeatedly: a single World Series from 1903 to 1968, league championship series from 1969, division series from 1981 and 1995, a wild card from 2012. The shape shown is whatever that season had. A series that ended level has no winner and is marked as such; a one-game tiebreaker decided who entered and sits below the bracket.
World Series
New York Yankees won the 1961 World Series.
The honours
Who won the title, the pennants and the divisions.
Champion
- New York Yankees109-53
Pennant winners
- New York YankeesAmerican League
- Cincinnati RedsNational League
Best record in the league
- New York Yankees109-53 · AL
2 teams reached the postseason.
The best games
The 5 highest-rated postseason games of 1961, best first.
How this is measured
Game Score is the site's composite rating of how good a game was to watch. It combines hype, quality, stakes and matchup rank, so a tight, late-series game between two strong sides scores highest and a loss can outrank a routine win. The workbook scores postseason games only, so this is the postseason's best. It is the same metric the all-time and by-decade boards on the MLB hub and the franchise pages use, so a game keeps the same score wherever it appears.
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, 1961.