It’s time for the year-end Continuum Baseball Rankings! This takes into account the Central American and Caribbean Games baseball tournament in November. And only that was used in updating this edition.

Originally, I was going to use the IBAF year-end ratings, but that led to a slight problem: It would break the system, as the best countries and worst countries would end up going so high or low numerically that I’d be unable to use them with the website I use to make these rankings.

So, I’ll instead be making up for that by using more games and events in future editions, using different “K-values” (basically how much a win or a loss can give points in) for each event based on the level of team placed in the event for each team. For example, if it’s a WBC tournament and the teams playing are the best that the country has to offer, they’ll be putting more points at stake than if, say, it’s a strictly-amateur affair. This will allow it to be more sensitive to games the higher the skills involved- so if, say, Team USA does well in the WBC, it would get more points than if, say, it had done well in a college exhibition series somewhere. This is a bit different then how “K-Values” are used in some other places, but I think it’ll be good.

More information on that later.

For now, however, below the jump you can see the differences that have occurred because of the CACG’s. As you can see, Cuba (which won the tournament) jumped up to number 3, past the DR. The biggest mover and shaker was Nicaragua, which jumped from 18 to 14 thanks to their good performance (they came in second). Guatemala made it’s first appearance but is waaaaaay back at 43.

Stay tuned for more on the new system.

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The Asian Games occurred late last month. Seven of the eight teams had a talent-level good enough to have it count for them in the Continuum Rankings (Korea, for example, sent KBO players, while Taipei sent players from the Affiliated Minors. The one team that didn’t qualify for Continuum Rankings was Japan, which sent amateurs and semi-pros, which isn’t enough to count). Korea won.

Now, despite all of this, there wasn’t too much movement. While Taipei lost a small amount of points and Korea gained over 19 points, those weren’t enough to cause any changes in the top 10. Instead, there were minor changes down the board, with China and Germany flip-flopping, South Africa and Hong Kong doing the same, and Finland and Mongolia switching places down near the bottom.

Anyway, look below the jump for the full rankings.

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