Softball: It may be best the ranking game isn’t one of chance
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This season has been tough on me. Ranking 25 teams every week in softball has taken its toll, left me curled up in a blanket watching ‘Murder, She Wrote’ reruns and quietly sobbing into a bag of Fritos.
If you have followed The Times’ top 25, you know that last week top-ranked Corona Santiago lost to a sub-.500 Corona Centennial and then laid the wood to second-ranked Norco. And what did I do? I left Santiago at No. 1, suffering no consequence for losing to a team that had previously been winless in the Mountain View League. Have I gone mad???
I told Editor Bob of my ‘problems,’ while continuing to mutter ‘parity, parity’ to my daughter’s teddy bear. Then Editor Bob reminded me that I don’t have a daughter. Finally, I admitted I might take to pulling names out of a hat, just to see if any monkey with two working digits can do what I do while I get some much-needed rest inside a room with comfortable rubbery walls. E-mails the last few weeks indicate that a growing number of schools want to be ranked and seem to think that the stars of ‘Orangutan Island’ can do a better job of determining the 25 best teams in the land. If only all schedules were created equal.
I grabbed a hat. I put 37 team names on pieces of paper.
Here’s the top 25 out of a hat (this week’s actual ranking and record in parenthesis):
1. Anaheim Canyon (11, 20-6)
2. Lakewood (13, 18-3)
3. Mission Viejo (NR, 19-5-1)
4. Santiago (1, 22-2)
5. Mater Dei (NR, 19-5)
Other notable selections:
8. Crescenta Valley (17, 21-0)
9. Beckman (NR, 17-6)
10. San Pedro (6, 24-3)
11. Oak Park (25, 16-4)
16. Norco (2, 22-5)
17. Granada Hills Kennedy (NR, 23-3-1)
18. La Palma Kennedy (4, 22-3)
25. Simi Valley (7, 23-0)
Missing the cut: El Toro (3, 19-6-1), Valencia (5, 20-5), Thousand Oaks (8, 18-4), Camarillo (15, 16-7) and Ayala (14, 16-9-1).
Actually, Canyon is an excellent candidate to be No. 1 in 2011, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Maybe if I offered the rankings just a little expertise, like grouping the top seven teams and the next eight teams, and then have everyone else vying for the bottom 10, the results would be better.
The top 5:
1. La Palma Kennedy (4, 22-3)
2. Norco (2, 22-5)
3. Valencia (5, 20-5)
4. San Pedro (6, 24-3)
5. Santiago (1, 22-2)
Other notable selections:
7. Simi Valley (7, 23-0)
12. Thousand Oaks (8, 18-4)
15. Hart (9, 19-3)
The No. 16-25 free-for-all:
16. Beckman (NR, 17-6)
17. Torrance (NR, 20-4)
18. North Torrance (NR, 18-8)
19. Crescenta Valley (17, 21-0)
20. Mater Dei (NR, 19-5)
21. Oak Park (25, 16-4)
22. Granada Hills Kennedy (NR, 23-3-1)
23. Ocean View (NR, 19-1)
24. Redlands (16, 19-4)
25. Fullerton (23, 18-6)
OK, so maybe pulling names out of a hat won’t make the rankings any better either. But I tried.
If you want to see the complete lists of this game of chance, here is the top 25 out of a hat (Download top_25_out_of_a_hat.doc), and here is the top 25 out of the hat with modification(Download out_of_the_hat_modified.doc).
Now I must find another bag of Fritos.
-- Martin Henderson