S6 First Quarter Power Rankings

  We are just over 25% of the way through Season 6 here in Hardball Stitches, so it's time to make our first check of the Quarterly Power Rankings to see where everyone stands as the league prepares to look towards the future and get their draft boards ready. In keeping with mini's tradition, this post will feature three sections: first, the power rankings (which are based on hitting and pitching statistics). Second will be a look the Expected Win Percentages/a comparison with the current win percentages and finally (and hopefully shortly) a look at teams who are on MWR watch for this season. 

Expected Wins

• Fargo: 0.720 Expected Win% (0.786 Actual) 
• St. Louis: 0.695 Expected Win% (0.644 Actual)
• Baltimore 0.682 Expected Win% (0.690 Actual)
• Cincinnati 0.638 Expected Win% (0.622 Actual)  
• Los Angeles 0.627 Expected Win% (0.571 Actual) 
• Tucson 0.597 Expected Win% (0.578 Actual) 
• Trenton 0.569 Expected Win% (0.667 Actual)
• Syracuse 0.565 Expected Win% (0.643 Actual) 
• Trenton 0.564 Expected Win% (0.667 Actual)
• Helena 0.559 Expected Win% (0.556 Actual)  
• Montgomery 0.551 Expected Win% (0.500 Actual)
• Buffalo 0.546 Expected Win% (0.533 Actual) 
• Portland 0.527 Expected Win% (0.548 Actual)
• Boise 0.519 Expected Win% (0.467 Actual) 
• Louisville 0.513 Expected Win% (0.429 Actual) 
• San Antonio 0.512 Expected Win% (0.511 Actual)
• Durham 0.496 Expected Win% (0.452 Actual) 
• Boston 0.491 Expected Win% (0.452 Actual) 
• New Orleans 0.490 Expected Win% (0.548 Actual) 
• Philadelphia 0.485 Expected Win% (0.524 Actual)
• Fresno 0.473 Expected Win% (0.511 Actual) 
• Charlotte 0.466 Expected Win% (0.400 Actual) 
• New York 0.463 Expected Win% (0.452 Actual)
• Mexico City 0.459 Expected Win% (0.444 Actual) 
• Tacoma 0.459 Expected Win% (0.381 Actual)
• Rochester 0.451 Expected Win% (0.444 Actual) 
• New York 0.423 Expected Win% (0.400 Actual)
• Florida 0.423 Expected Win% (0.356 Actual) 
• Colorado Springs 0.422 Expected Win% (0.489 Actual)  
• Texas 0.391 Expected Win% (0.310 Actual) 
• Vancouver 0.348 Expected Win% (0.357 Actual) 
• Nashville 0.270 Expected Win% (0.378 Actual) 
• Arizona 0.249 Expected Win% (0.357 Actual) 

The Dreaded List

• Texas: 0.310 Win% = 50 win pace

Season 6 Hall of Fame Voting

 For the first time in Hardball Stitches history, we have a player on the HOF Nominations page. PaleHose72 suggested that we vote him in on the basis of being the initial nominee in Stitches history, which I would be 100% on board with 😀 However, I also want to use his candidacy to illustrate the HOF process that I've used in a couple of other worlds that has had pretty good success. 

That process relies on a number of statistics and also a Hall of Fame Committee. In short, we track the statistics and then, as a committee, use those to come up with up to three "Hall of Fame Locks" for the season that the world then pools their votes around to make sure we get at least a few people elected each year. To start with, I want to do a quick rundown of the stats that mini and I have been tracking that will be useful for evaluating HOF candidacy: 

1. Hall of Fame Monitor Score - My personal favorite of all of Bill James' Hall of Fame metrics, which assigns point values to certain statistical milestones both for individual seasons and overall careers. A score of 100 is a player who "should" be in the Hall while a score of 130 is your "no-brainer, should probably be elected on the first ballot" type. Conversely, a score of 70 could get in but represents a borderline case. I've also seen players with scores in the 50s get in if they have some sort of special circumstance or specific feat they accomplished as well. 
2. Wins Above Replacement - The general concept is fairly self-explanatory to those who pay attention to SABR metrics, but there are a couple of quick things that are worth noting in this space. First and foremost, the method of calculating WAR that Mini and I have developed is as customized to Hardball as possible (i.e., calibrated to an HBD run environment, incorporating HBD park factors, etc.) Secondly, Around The Horn will probably be our best reference point for what makes a Hall of Fame player in terms of WAR...I have been a member since Season 1 and also tracking WAR for the blog there the whole time. With one exception (a pitcher who was a no-brainer HOFer before the merger that created Around The Horn) everyone who has been elected to the Hall there had at least 43.9 WAR for their careers. 
3. Hall of Fame Standards Test - Another Bill James metric, this one is on a 0-100 scale with a hard cap at 100 but in MLB Babe Ruth is only a 79 and the highest score in history is Christy Matthewson at 84. {NOTE: Babe Ruth the hitter was a 79, Babe Ruth the pitcher would combine to bring his total score over 100} I don't have any HBD reference for this, but the linked explainer says an "average Hall of Famer" would score 50 so I'd imagine that I would have a hard time voting for anyone who did not score at least 40 points. 
4. Importance Score: This 2021 article by Mike Petrellio, ranking the best ever free-agent signings, is the origin of the metric I've come to call "Importance Score." It combines WAR per year with bonus points for winning WS Rings and individual awards, and since there are typically three camps in HOF voting (personal performance, "the ring is the thing", other hardware) this has always felt like the perfect blend of those three things. As a result, this has become my go-to HOF gauge when I have all of the pieces needed to calculate it (I've found that a score of 10.0 or higher is HOF quality and the highest score I've seen is 36.8, but that was a 9x Cy Young who also had multiple rings.) 

Typically if a player meets the standard on one of the above, they meet the standard on the majority if not all of them. The job of the committee in my experience, has been to do a bit of hair-splitting and decide which of those should be considered locks and which should be up for a world vote. 

At long last, let's examine the case of our first nominee: Aaron Cepicky. 

• HOF Monitor Score: 5 points 
• Wins Above Replacement: -3.68 through S4, S5 was probably positive but not 3.7 wins so he's almost certainly a net negative for his career 
• HOF Standards: 21.9 points
• 2 points for OBP, 19.9 for C defense  
• Importance Score: Negative WAR, 0 MVP, 0 WS Rings, 0 seasons above 4 WAR = Negative Importance Score 
• Conclusion: His one and only claim to fame is being the first guy on the ballot. But I'm for it, personally. 

Season 6 Draft Lottery

 After being quite late on the Season 5 Draft Order, the goal of this post is two fold: first, to establish the Draft Order for Season 6 and also to explain the logistics of the MWR using our first two examples. When consulting the committee, I expressed that I was hoping to settle on a rule that was "straightforward, fair, enforcable and also allows teams to rebuild in a reasonable amount of time while still feeling like it is something people would want to avoid." 

 We have come to the conclusion that the penalty for missing the MWR will be "Teams winning fewer than 55 games in a season will pick no higher than 10th in the ensuing Amateur Draft regardless of lottery results. If multiple teams win less than 55 games, the team that comes the closest recieves the 10th pick, 2nd closest gets the 11th pick and so on. Ties will be broken using the highest Expected Win Percentage among tied teams." 

All of this brings us to Step 1: assigning lottery odds. This is done entirely by end-of-season record regardless of whether or not the MWR was achieved. Based on the S5 win totals, we get the following:

Next is Step 2: conducting the actual lottery. The results of the ping-pong ball frenzy are below: 

Step 3: Enforcing the MWR. We had two teams who fell short of the 55 win benchmark in Season 5: Louisville (46 wins) and Boise (54 wins.) Boise was closer to the threshold, so they get the #10 pick and Louisville gets the #11 pick and everyone else gets slotted in according to the ping pong balls. The final result is as follows: 

1. Tacoma
2. Philadelphia
3. Vancouver
4. Charlotte
5. Nashville
6. Arizona
7. Texas
8. Helena
9. Colorado Springs
10. Boise
11. Louisville
12. Chicago {moved to New York in Season 6} 
13. Durham
14. Baltimore
15. Portland
16. Los Angeles

Season 5 Draft Lottery

 At long last: the Draft Lottery has run! After many real-life delays and then several technical glitches, we finally have our Season 5 Amateur Draft Order. A few points of order and clarification on the logistics of how we got here. First of all, Bob and I returned to the original post made by minihouston explaining how this lottery is supposed to work, outlined in the following post from Season 2: 

In short: Compensation picks stay where they are, and the top six picks are semi-protected from the lottery (meaning they can pick no worse than six spots lower than their intended slot.) So, now we get down to the business of figuring out what the Draft Spreadsheet says the order is supposed to be so we can figure out what tweaks need to be made to adhere to the rules outlined above. Here's the screenrecording of the sheet generating the order: 

Based on these two data points, here's how the first round and Supplemental Round finally shake out: 

1. Charlotte 
2. Helena
3. Arizona
4. Boise
5. Durham
6. Vancouver
7. Tacoma
8. Colorado Springs
9. Louisville
10. Philadelphia
11. Portland
12. Rochester
13. Los Angeles
14. Chicago
15. Cincinnati
16. Helena (via Type D Compensation for Kevin Braden) **2nd pick**
17. New York 
18. Texas
19. Mexico City
20. Nashville
21. Buffalo
22. Kansas City
23. New Orleans
24. Texas **2nd pick**
25. Fresno
26. Baltimore
27. Tucson
28. San Antonio 
29. Tacoma **2nd pick**
30. Syracuse
31. Trenton
32. Trenton **2nd pick**
33. Boston
34. Texas **3rd pick**
35. Charlotte **2nd pick**
36. Tacoma  **3rd pick**
37. New York **2nd pick**
38. Texas **4th pick**
39. Tucson **2nd pick**
40. Trenton **3rd pick**
41. Tucson **3rd pick**
42. Tucson **4th pick**
43. Charlotte **3rd pick**
44. Durham **2nd pick**
45. Colorado Springs **2nd pick**
46. Philadelphia **2nd pick**
47. Portland **2nd pick**
48. Los Angeles **2nd pick**
49. New York **3rd pick**
50. Texas **5th pick**
51. Nashville **2nd pick**
52. New Orleans **2nd pick**
53. Fresno **2nd pick**
54. Baltimore **2nd pick**
55. Fargo
56. Charlotte **4th pick**
57. Fargo **2nd pick**

Season 5 First Quarter Power Rankings

 We are just over 25% of the way through Season 5 here in Hardball Stitches, so it's time to make our first check of the Quarterly Power Rankings to see where everyone stands as the league prepares to look towards the future and get their draft boards ready. In keeping with mini's tradition, this post will feature three sections: first, the power rankings (which are based on hitting and pitching statistics). Second will be a look the Expected Win Percentages/a comparison with the current win percentages and finally (and hopefully shortly) a look at teams who are on MWR watch for this season. 

Who is Under/Over Performing? Referencing Expected Win Percentages

• Boston 0.760 ExpWin% (0.756 Actual) **AL EAST LEADER**
• St. Louis 0.742 ExpWin% (0.683 Actual) **NL EAST LEADER**
• Montgomery 0.727 ExpWin% (0.683 Actual) **AL SOUTH LEADER**
• Fresno 0.647 ExpWin% (0.571 Actual) 
• Trenton 0.641 ExpWin% (0.683 Actual)  **NL NORTH LEADER**
• Tucson 0.622 ExpWin% (0.595 Actual) **NL WEST LEADER**
• Fargo 0.581 ExpWin% (0.537 Actual) **AL NORTH LEADER**
• Kansas City 0.580 ExpWin% (0.634 Actual) **NL WC2**
• Syracuse 0.537 ExpWin% (0.537 Actual)
• New York 0.526 ExpWin% (0.537 Actual) **AL WC2**
• New Orleans 0.522 ExpWin% (0.585 Actual) **AL WC1**
• Rochester 0.517 ExpWin% (0.463 Actual) 
• Durham 0.506 ExpWin% (0.512 Actual)
• Cincinnati 0.500 ExpWin% (0.610 Actual) **NL WC1**
• Texas 0.498 ExpWin% (0.537 Actual)
• Helena 0.495 ExpWin% (0.537 Actual) 
• Buffalo 0.487 ExpWin% (0.439 Actual) 
• Portland 0.481 ExpWin% (0.463 Actual)
• Colorado Springs 0.475 ExpWin (0.500 Actual) 
• Baltimore 0.475 ExpWin% (0.488 Actual)
• Philadelphia 0.473 ExpWin% (0.488 Actual)
• Mexico City 0.461 ExpWin% (0.463 Actual) **NL SOUTH LEADER**
• Los Angeles 0.458 ExpWin% (0.463 Actual) **AL WEST LEADER**
• Tacoma 0.449 ExpWin% (0.463 Actual)
• San Antonio 0.449 ExpWin% (0.415 Actual) 
• Arizona 0.420 ExpWin% (0.341 Actual)
• Boise 0.387 ExpWin% (0.381 Actual) 
• Louisville 0.373 ExpWin% (0.293 Actual) 
• Charlotte 0.325 ExpWin% (0.366 Actual) 
• Chicago 0.325 ExpWin% (0.317 Actual)
• Nashville 0.297 ExpWin% (0.317 Actual)  
• Vancouver 0.220 ExpWin% (0.317 Actual) 

The Dreaded List

• Louisville: 0.293 Win% = 47 win pace
• Vancouver: 0.317 Win% = 51 win pace
• Nashville: 0.317 Win% = 51 win pace
• Chicago: 0.317 Win% = 51 win pace

Season 4 Recap

Archers not stopped, but temporarily contained 

Last season we posed the question of whether or not there was a dynasty being formed in St. Louis. This year, I don't think there's any doubt about it: "the d word" is definitely in play...they've been to each of the first four World Series in Hardball Stitches history. Let us not forget, however: the title did not return to the city of arches. Instead, it travelled northward to the Queen City of the Prarie thanks to their Mud Dogs after they took down St. Louis in an entertaining World Series matchup. Now let's dig into the details of what happened last season: 

All-Star Weekend: Data not recorded 😥

American League

Division Titles 

• AL North: Fargo (1st)
• AL East: Boston (4th straight)
• AL Central: Montgomery (1st)
• AL West: Los Angeles (1st) 

Wild Cards

• Syracuase: 1st WC, 4th playoff appearance 
• Baltimore: 1st playoff appearance

National League

Division Titles

• NL North: Trenton (4th straight)
• NL East: St. Louis (4th straight)
• NL Central: San Antonio (2nd straight)
• NL West: Tucson (1st)

Wild Cards

• Fresno: 1st WC, 3rd playoff appearance 
• Indianapolis {now Kansas City}: 4th straight WC appearance

League Leaders: Data not recorded 😥

Awards

AL MVP: Matt Roberts (LF-Baltimore), 1st career MVP Award

NL MVP: Matthew Corey (1B-Tucson), 2nd straight MVP Award (2nd overall as well) 

AL Cy Young: Glenallen Cepicky (SP-Boston), 1st career Cy Young Award

NL Cy Young: Tex Richardson (SP-St. Louis), 1st career Cy Young Award

AL Rookie of the Year: Gerrit Martin (DH-Texas)

NL Rookie of the Year: Chan Iwamura (RP-Cincinnati)

AL Fireman of the Year: Jose Rios (RP-New Orleans), 2nd straight FOY Award (3rd overall) 

NL Fireman of the Year: David Gonzales (RP-Cincinnati), 1st career FOY Award

Minor Leagues

AAA

• World Series: Philadelphia def. Buffalo 4-2 (1st AAA title)
• Best Record: Los Angeles (98-46)
• Worst Record: Louisville (30-114)

AA

• World Series: Scottsdale {now Boise} def. Texas 4-1 (3rd AA title)
• Best Record: Scottsdale (99-45)
• Worst Record: Arizona (34-110)

High A 

• World Series: Fargo def. Charlotte 4-2 (1st HiA title)
• Best Record: Fargo (93-51)
• Worst Record: Louisville (29-115) 

Low A

• World Series: Nashville def. Boston 4-0 (1st LoA title)
• Best Record: Charlotte (111-33)
• Worst Record: Arizona (30-114)

Rookie

• World Series: Montgomery def. Nashville 4-2 (1st RL title)
• Best Record: Charlotte (65-11)
• Worst Record: St. Louis (8-68)

I owe our readers an apology.

Somewhere between deadlines, domestic distractions, and a little too much enthusiasm for the All-Star Weekend festivities, I let the important things slip—namely, the complete data collection for the All-Star recap and the league leader sections of this season review.

In my defense (a weak one, I admit), the lights were bright, the games were loud, the celebrations were plentiful, and for a brief, ill-advised stretch, I convinced myself I could circle back and gather the numbers later. That confidence, like many late-night decisions, proved misplaced.

Personal matters demanded attention. The weekend demanded indulgence. And the spreadsheets, regrettably, were left waiting.

This article reflects the season as it was lived—intense, unpredictable, occasionally chaotic—but it falls short of the statistical completeness you deserve. For that, I take full responsibility and promise that future recaps will show better discipline, fewer distractions, and a much healthier respect for both data and moderation.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be returning to my notes—wide awake, clear-headed, and determined to keep the fun firmly in check next time.

— Jack Torrance, Contributor