It’s the Continuum Baseball Rankings! Thanks to good performances in basically every tournament that wasn’t the WBC, the United States went to number one in the IBAF’s world rankings, and that helped them also move to the top in the Continuum Rankings. Japan and Cuba also benefited from international play results that the IBAF rankings follow (but I don’t always follow), and Japan further benefited from a 3-game sweep over Taipei in November. This caused the Dominican to fall to fourth, mainly because they didn’t play much after the WBC and weren’t in the best of positions in the IBAF ratings.
Similar things happened to other Latin American teams, and that leads to another issue I’ll have to figure out: due to those country’s baseball systems, which often have financial problems outside of the WBC as far as going overseas. I’m going to try and figure out a way to try and counter this without bringing back in the number of MLB players and MLB Win Shares.
Anyway, these ratings include the 2013 end-of-year IBAF World Rankings, the three games “Samurai Japan” and the Chinese Taipei national team played, games between “professional or equivalent” teams in the East Asian Games and the entirety (since all teams in it were “professional or equivalent”… which is to say, they were all each country’s best players, in this case amateurs) of the West Asian Baseball Cup.
The next update will be after the Caribbean World Series in February.
Go below the jump to see it:
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