You hear it all the time about the baseball season: It’s a marathon, not a sprint.* The baseball season is the longest one in American team sports. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are always calls for a shorter season, and not only from people who don’t like baseball, or think playing spring games when there’s still snow on the ground is dumb, or having the playoffs stretch into November is dumber. There’s nothing that makes 162 games sacrosanct other than tradition and revenues per game.

If the season were shorter, though, it’d be different, leading to different results. For purposes of this exercise, I looked at what the season would look like if it were only as long as those of the major sports leagues. I calculated the standings after each team’s games played this season and went with that. For example, if there were a league with a 50-game season (there isn’t), I considered each team’s first 50 games of the season.

Now, you’re going to say that’s stupid, and I won’t disagree. If the MLB season were shortened, they wouldn’t just schedule a 162-game season and end it early. They’d adjust the season to preserve some semblance of balance. But that would require conjecture, not to mention work. So let’s just go with MLB standings after N games in a season, stupid or not.

Oh, and one more thing that’s stupid: Since teams hit games-played milestones at different points in the season, these totals don’t necessarily sum to .500.