CWalley26

The Little League fields here have the ones with pitch count, got them about 12 years ago....puts it out there for everyone to see, at the time they were about $2,500 each if I remember correctly.

I dove in and went all baseball nerd today and figured out (the rather simple) formula being used to generate the rankings. All that's factored into it is your opponents cumulative winning percentage plus your winning percentage. That number gives you the total which drives your ranking. Many components are not factored in (understandably). If you play out of state competition it doesn't affect your strength rating (for the most part), an example of that would be UH played 4 out of state teams that have a combined record of 50-39 and that's not factored in while Hampton played 7 out of state teams plus 3 games vs the home school team, those teams have a combined record of 40-99 but only register as 1-1 on the site, North Greene played just one game that doesn't factor (vs the home school). As previously mentioned there is also no reward for a small school to play larger classifications (from a poll perspective) so in the case of UH (14 of their 28 games vs AAA and AAAA) and NG (15 of their 24 games were vs AA and AAA) and Hampton (5 of their 30 vs AA and AAA) they each gain no "bonus" points for playing up when it comes to the strength factor and looking at it from a large school perspective there would be no penalty for playing "down". Another factor to take a look at would be if you have a game on the schedule that was never played and it still shows in the C.T. schedule online, that game will factor into your strength, example being UH has a game that was cancelled vs GP that still shows on the schedule, GP's 3-14 record is being negatively factored into UH's strength. Having said all of this the only thing it really proves is I spent way too much time looking into this. I love this site, always have, and I appreciate the fact that its here - its a great source of info that otherwise would be only avail with M.P. and we all know that site is extremely hit or miss on what you can get from it.

While I don't see where Hampton is ranked 2nd I do see that they are 7th in A while UH is 9th and beat them soundly in both matchups, NG comes in at 12th and split the season series with both Hampton and UH. Hampton's schedule appears to be one designed to rack up W's as they have played most of the year against weak single A opponents while UH has spent the season playing AAA and AAAA teams (not all of them juggernauts mind you but larger competition none the less) and NG played about half their games vs AA comp. The C.T. rankings are based off of your strength of schedule (opponents winning %, playing a higher classification doesn't provide any boost in schedule strength) and your success rate so with this formula if you beat a 10-10 single A school and someone else beats a 10-10 AAAA school it would factor the same. It appears C.T. has UH with a strength of schedule ranking of 11th toughest in A ball, NG at 19th and Hampton at 46th. One can only assume that if UH's schedule was that much harder than Hampton's and beat them H2H in the two matchups that you would most likely find yourself ranked higher. All that said I would guess that a rep from C.T. would tell you that its not an exact science and they do the best they can. I think it just proves that you really can't put a lot into rankings at any point in the season, there appears to be no reward (from a poll perspective) for playing tough opponents vs a slew of easy W's. When its all said and done the up and coming tournaments will provide us with the only rankings that ultimately matter.