Sorted kubectl output and awk provide the table view with a header. Installation of extra tools is not needed.

# kubectl get pods --sort-by=.status.startTime | awk 'NR == 1; NR > 1 {print $0 | "tac"}'

An approach with JSON processor offered by paulogrell works also but could require more effort: for some Linux distributions you'll need to download and compile jq from source code. As for the jq command line I'd suggest to add the "name" to the map parameters and sort by "timestamp":

# kubectl get pods -o json | jq '.items | group_by(.metadata.creationTimestamp) | map({"name": .[0].metadata.name, "timestamp": .[0].metadata.creationTimestamp, "count": length}) | sort_by(.timestamp)'

Not supported by kubectl or the kube-apiserver as of this writing (AFAIK), but a workaround would be:

$ kubectl get pods --sort-by=.metadata.creationTimestamp | tail -n +2 | tac

or if tac is not available (MacOS X):

$ kubectl get pods --sort-by=.metadata.creationTimestamp | tail -n +2 | tail -r

If you want the header:

$ echo 'NAME                                                              READY   STATUS             RESTARTS   AGE' | \
 kubectl get pods --sort-by=.metadata.creationTimestamp | tail -n +2 | tac

You might just have to adjust the tabs on the header accordingly.

I believe the Kubernetes API doesnt support this option yet, but as a workaround you can use a JSON processor (jq) to adjust its output.

Ascending

kubectl get pods -o json | jq '.items | group_by(.metadata.creationTimestamp) | map({"timestamp": .[0].metadata.creationTimestamp, "count": length}) | sort_by(.count)'

Descending

kubectl get pods -o json | jq '.items | group_by(.metadata.creationTimestamp) | map({"timestamp": .[0].metadata.creationTimestamp, "count": length}) | sort_by(.count) | reverse'

Hope this helps