Week 1 Real Ranking

For Chris, the Real Rankings are something I started doing a few years ago as a way for everyone to assess their teams beyond wins and losses.  Instead of matching up your team’s production vs. your opponent, the Real Rankings match them up against the rest of the league. The two tables show your Real Ranking for the week and the average Real Ranking for the season.  The lower your score, the higher your rank.

The Real Rankings have been extremely accurate over the course of the season. Obviously, there is a lot of variation week to week based solely on the variable matchups. But by the end of the year the different in the Real Rankings and the Actual Standings is usually no more than 2 spots.

This verifies that winning % is a good way to assess team performance, but allows us all to be a little more honest when assessing our team’s production. Each week there are examples that show this variation. This week, we have Ring of Fire 10th in the actual standings but in reality they had the 5th best week according to the Real Rankings -- that's because Dagan went up against Knuckle Sandwich, which ended up with the third best week in the Real Rankings. Likewise, Chris' Actual Standings was held back by his opponent. On the other end, my team, Montezuma's Revenge is second in the Actual Standings but just 4th in the real rankings thanks to a poor week by Anal Hershiser. In some cases, like Kyle and his Angry Pirates, he had the best week in the Real and Actual and his opponent had a very poor week.

For the tables, the Weekly ranking just shows where you ranked in each individual category. Going left to right in columns, the Overall ranking shows the RR (ranking), ACT (actual standings), +/- (difference between Actual and Real – this should get smaller as the year goes on), Team, OV (Overall – average overall ranking of all weeks), H (average ranking for season – just hitting), RK (ranking of H), P (average ranking for season – just pitching), RK (ranking of P), VAR (variance – shows volatility of the weekly results for the season), 1-21 (weeks)

These posts will also typically include Notes based on the week’s activity, results, trends, etc.

Always interesting to see how quickly people give up on players. It’s obviously warranted in some cases, usually because of injury or playing time concerns. So far, Jose Pereza (12th round), Reynaldo Lopez (14th round), and Craig Kimbrel (15th round) are the highest picks dropped.

Keep in mind the 60 transaction limit is still in place. It’s always a lot higher earlier in the season, but something everyone should monitor.