Elite Fantasy Players

2009 ELITE FANTASY BASEBALL TOP 20

Commissioners Corner

Discuss this on the Elite Forum

By John Thornton

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

JoE's SwaG SHaCk

The Pretenders

Alicia Lynn Pieri

Giggling Goombahs

Team dalrymple

Kamikaze Squirrels

Chopper to Chipper

Flexiblecoot

The aPaulOs

Chicos Bail Bond's

El Whoppo

Team Newsome

Cory's Crew

Gashouse Gorillas

the beardedstarfish

16 Ounce Pounders

Fun go

RMS Titanic

Tampico Stogies

Team knapton

Appalachian

Florida State

Elite

NY-Penn

Centennial

Appalachian

Great Lakes

Elite

Pioneer

Appalachian

Cape Cod

Eastern

International

South Atlantic

Eastern

Florida State

Southern

Midwest

Northwest

2904

2849

2758

2740

2664

2592

2590

2580

2567

2541

2491

2471

2461

2460

2430

2429

2420

2379

2375

October 3, 2009

Quite a few managers have contacted me over the past few months in regards to the ranking process we've developed for Elite. Elite co-founder Tarrell Graham and I have spend countless hours trying to come up with accurate ways to track and measure the strength of our teams and leagues. Our research has been a lot of trial and error in conjuction with some serious number crunching.

The rankings are a very important ascpect of the Elite fantasy community, as it allows us to recognize highly competitve and talented managers across all league levels. While it may take several years for a managers to rise to the Elite League level and stake his/her claim as one of the best, the power rankings give managers the opportunity to make a name for themselves right out of the gate. So, get out that TI-83 (or abacus) and lets do the math...

Baseball

League power: Not all leagues are created equal, thats no secret. In one league you might find Cole Hamels relegated to the wire after one bad start, while another league might be so solid that not even a decent setup man can be had for free. League power is calculated by ranking all leagues against eachother across all 12 scoring categories and then by league activity. First, totals for each league in each category are calculated by adding all 12 teams stats together. The the stat totals are then ranked league by league. For example, lets say there are 10 leagues. The best league in each category would receive 10 points, while the worst team receives 1. Then each league is ranked in the same way by league activity. With daily games and transactions, a leagues activity is an important factor when determining strength. Activity is calculated like this: aquisitions + trades + activations. To clarify, aquisitions are waiver wire adds and free agent adds. Activations represent the action a manger takes to move players between his bench and starting lineup. So, heres the full formula for league power:

League Power = R + HR + RBI + BB + SB + AVG + K + W + SV + HD + ERA + WHIP)

Team power: The formula for calculating baseball team power rankings is fairly simple. First, every team is ranked from best to worst across all 12 scoring categories. For our purposes, lets assume that there are 200 teams in the Elite Fantasy Baseball system. In this case, the team that scored the highest in a category would receive 200 points while the team that scored the lowest would receive 1. All 12 categories are ranked this way and then the points are added together to give a team its base score. This score is then weighted for league strength by simply adding the teams league power score to the point total. League power equals approximately 10% of a teams power ranking. Heres the math:

Team Power = (R + HR + RBI + BB + SB + AVG + K + W + SV + HD + ERA + WHIP) + LEAGUE POWER

Team activity: It's no surprise that the majority of successful teams are also very active. This doesn't necessarily mean that every active team will have success, but it is the first step and very important in maintaining competitive leagues. So, we monitor activty very closely in an effort to weed out dead teams, and more importantly, to recognize the most active and competitive managers. Our goal is to examine how active a manger is compared to the rest of his leaguemates. Therefore, we compare the key indicators of activity (aquisitions, trades, and activations) for each team against the overall activity in the Elite system in each of those areas. It looks like this:

Team Activity = (Aquisitions / Elite Aquisitions) + (Activations / Elite Activations) + (Trades / Elite Trades)

Football

League power: Calculating a football leagues strength is much simpler than any other sport. It simply comes down to how many points all 12 managers in the league score collectively. So, the math:

League Power = Cumulative points scored for all managers

Team power: Determining a a fantasy football teams strength is much more difficult than baseball. Because of the head-to-head nature of fantasy football, wins are everything when it comes to success. The amount of points a team scores in any given week may or may not be enough to capture a win. It's all about the matchup, and yes, even luck, when it comes to winning a fantasy football league. When coming up with a method for calculating a teams true strength, we wanted to strike a balance between wins, points scored, and league power. Our formula is set up to give equal weight to wins and points scored. This is achieved by making each win worth the average points-per-week scored by all teams in the football system. So if there are 100 teams, we add all 100 teams' points scored together, divide that by 100, then divide that by the number of weeks completed for the season. The number we get from this calculatioin, average team points scored per week, becomes the value for every win a team has. If average points-per-week is 100 and a team has 5 wins, they will receive 500 points for those wins. Next, each teams points scored total is added to the win points. This total is then weighted for league strength. We account for league strength by making the league with the most points worth a value of 1. Every other leagues points total is then divided by the highest-scoring leagues points total which gives us a number between 0 and 1 (usually in the 0.75 to 1 range). Heres the formula: