Tag Archives: ratings

Some stuff at the bottom in the August 2, 2014 Continuum Baseball Rankings

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It’s been awhile, but it’s time to update the Continuum Baseball Rankings! The C-Levels of the European Championships took place recently, and since it included previously-included Continuum Rankings teams like Israel, Ireland and Slovenia and involved senior teams (i.e. the best players they could round up given circumstances), it counts in the Rankings! Of course, the best players that these teams could get aren’t necessarily that great (the best rosters in this tournament would probably be beaten by fairly good D3 college teams)- Israel didn’t have Minor League ringers this time around like in the WBC Qualifiers, for example. But still, it counts, and Israel won it.

So, the movements in this installment (all at the bottom of the rankings, more or less):

  • Slovenia and Ireland swapped places, with Slovenia (which finished 2nd in the tournament) taking 47th while Ireland (4th) fell to 48.
  • Romania entered the rankings at 49, pushing Mongolia (inactive) back to 50.
  • Finland, Latvia, Hungary and Norway made their Rankings debut, being 51, 52, 53, and 54, respectively. Norway is now the lowest-rated team in the Rankings, and would, if they were to face a Senior USA team (which could mean anything from Indy Leaguers all the way up to MLB-filled WBC teams), lose over 99.39% of the time.

 

Lastly, a note about methodology: To make updates a bit more active, I am considering making it so that the Rankings cover everything 18 and over. This would bring in results by college teams and the like. Such a change won’t be made until 2015, but it’s something to note.

 

Anyway, current rankings are after the jump:

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Some minor movement in post-2014 Caribbean Series Continuum Baseball Rankings

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The Caribbean Series is included in the Continuum Baseball Rankings because it’s between the champions of leagues, and usually are primarily made up of players from those countries anyway (the Asian Series isn’t included because the Australian League is full of North Americans on most teams).

So, Mexico won this year’s Caribbean Series, while Cuba’s champion surprisingly came up the rear. So, how did this affect the Continuum Rankings? Well, nothing major, but there were some small moves, such as the Dominican and Cuba switching around.

Go below the jump for it:

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The USA returns to first in late January Continuum Rankings Update

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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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A Change in The Continuum Baseball Rankings method

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As I mentioned yesterday, the latest installment of the Continuum Baseball Rankings is coming up.

However, there will be one major difference: I will not be taking into account the number of MLB players and Win Shares for each country, instead using only the input of the IBAF World Rankings and results from international tournaments in which a country’s “professional or equivalent” team took part.

There are a few reasons for this.

For one, using MLB players and MLB win shares in it heavily skews it towards the USA, Dominican Republic, etc.

For another, it skews away from countries that have their own leagues, such as Japan and Korea, as well as an isolated nation like Cuba.

Finally, they are at times incomplete, as the site I use to find the numbers for it goes by place of birth, not necessarily nationality, leading to, for example, Donald Lutz being listed as an American and not a German.

So, when the next Rankings update comes up, it’ll have used a different method for things that happened after July of this past year.

Britain moves up and Russia shows up on Continuum Baseball Rankings after European B-Levels

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(For information on the Continuum Rankings and how they are figured out, go here.)

Over the past month or so, there have been qualifiers for Europe’s baseball championships that will take place next year, with two qualifying competitions in Europe’s “B-Level” of baseball competition. Great Britain and Russia won their pools, and they benefited from it greatly in the Continuum Baseball Rankings, with the British jumping from 20th overall to 18th overall, and Russia entering the rankings at 32.

If you are curious, the countries that had not been in the rankings before today were given initial scores based on how far back they were of Indonesia and France in the IBAF world rankings.

Anyway, to see the latest ratings/rankings, go below the jump.

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The Dominican moves to the top spot in the Post-WBC Baseball Continuum Rankings

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With the WBC over, the Baseball Continuum Rankings have been updated. The rankings take into account both individual games as well as the overall 1-16 rankings that the WBC participants ended up being ranked into at the end.

And the biggest jump in the Rankings after the WBC came in the case of the Dominican Republic. Their eight wins and #1 finish added 90.89 points to their total, rocketing them up to 269.89 total points, putting them in first for in the Baseball Continuum Rankings, ahead of the USA (231.079, having lost about 3 points in the Classic).

The team that suffered the most from the Classic was Australia. Their 0-3 record and last-place finish (based on tie breakers) caused them to lose 98.5 points, sending them tumbling to -28.5 points.

So, go below the jump for the latest Baseball Continuum Rankings, as of March 20, 2013:

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