Note: This was all but finished yesterday, but due to a personal matter I was unable to put the finishing touches on it and post live. Please treat all stats and observations to be as of Monday morning.

We’re doing it like EPMD this week, strictly business.

1. New York Yankees: Last week – 2, WAR% – .640 (2), FAN% – .580 (2), TOTAL% – .5967
If you had to pick one Yankee to be atop the ISO leaderboards, you might pick Mark Teixeira (7th) or Alex Rodriguez (22nd), but you probably wouldn’t pick Russell Martin (21st) or Curtis Granderson (2nd), whose tear has his star rising almost as fast as Rosie Huntington-Whiteley’s

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From 2006 to 2009, the Arizona Diamondbacks pitching staff was one of the best in the Majors. Last season, however, the staff was in shambles, with Dan Haren’s trade the cherry on the sundae of what was a truly terrible season for Arizona hurlers. As Jack Moore touched on earlier today, the bullpen has pitched much better thus far, and while the rotation has overall been poor and it would be fantastic if Haren in the fold, there are positive signs from the starting rotation.

As of today, three sets of teammates reside in the top 15 in pitching WAR: Roy Halladay (1), Cole Hamels (5) and Cliff Lee (11); Haren (2) and Jered Weaver (4); and Daniel Hudson (10) and Ian Kennedy (13). Hudson in particular has been fantastic, though you wouldn’t know it from his ERA. Despite wearing a .335 BABIP — good for seventh worst among qualified pitchers — Hudson is sporting a 2.52 FIP and 65 FIP-, marks that are both in the top 11 in the Majors. He has done so by improving in a few ways. First, he has upped his ground ball count. He hasn’t suddenly morphed into Derek Lowe, but he has pulled his GB/FB ration to even. Second, he has had some extra life on his fastball, as Mike Podhorzer noted here. His K/9 is also up over last year, and the combination of more strikeouts and more ground balls has led to fewer home runs allowed. His walks have ticked up a bit as well, as has his WHIP, but if his BABIP stabilizes, his WHIP should drop along with it.

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This past week, we saw some great research introduced on when the standings actually start to matter. It showed that the really great and really bad teams don’t really shake out until June, so despite the fact that the bottom five teams have been identical in each of the power rankings’ first three weeks, there is still time for one of those teams to escape the bottom of the pack. In our third week, teams are starting to make bigger jumps in the standings. In week two, only two teams moved three or more places from week one. This week that number was seven, with three teams (the Angels, Rangers and Twins) dropping at least five spots.

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Before we begin, all Indians fans reading this need to watch this clip. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Thank you. The major critics of our newly unveiled, and generally well received Power Rankings last week were Indians fans, who were up in arms about them being ranked so low, and specifically wanted the Fan Standings replaced with a different system. Unfortunately, the Indians actually fare better in the Fan Standings, which had the Tribe at 73 wins, than if we used ZiPS forecasted standings, which had them at 71. In general, I do understand the criticism of a subjective measure like the Fan Standings, but as Dave Cameron noted in last week’s comments, the Fan Standings actually have held up just as well as any other projection system. So while Indians fans aren’t going to be any happier this week, I think you all should all give yourselves some credit — the fans that have voted for our Fan Standings, i.e. you, are smarter than the average bear.

1. New York Yankees: Last week – 1, WAR% – .675 (1), FAN% – .580 (2), TOTAL% – .599
Did you hear that Derek Jeter homered? He was never likely to finish the year as bad as he started it, and he also comes home to this. In other words, you can stop pitying Jeter.

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The Mariners offense is comfortably in baseball’s bottom third. And while they are getting positive offensive contributions from Ichiro Suzuki, Adam Kennedy and Milton Bradley, who knows where they would be without Justin Smoak, who, after a 7-for-12 performance against the Rangers this week, is beginning to look more and more like the potentially great player many thought he was when he was traded last season. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the latest feature here at FanGraphs – our take on the Power Rankings that nearly every website in existence publishes, only with our own little twist.

In an effort to make this quantitative (that’s what we do around here, after all), we’re combining objective measures of 2011 performance with some subjective wisdom from our FanGraphs crowd. To this end, we’ve created a weighted system based on three factors — a WAR-based 2011 winning percentage (essentially, WAR/G shown as a winning percentage, or WAR% for short); the preseason Fan’s Standings determined from readership input ( which we’ll call FAN% for short); and the number of games each team has played. The two winning percentages are combined to create TOTAL%, on which the Power Rankings are based.

A team’s WAR% is given weighting equal to the percentage of 2011 season that the team has played. Right now, teams fall in the 15-18% range, as they have played between 26 and 29 games. As the season progresses — and we learn more about each team’s true level of talent — the WAR% will receive a greater weight with the FAN% receiving less weight. This system essentially acts as a built-in regression for current performance so that we don’t overreact to small samples of data, but it also allows for how teams have done to influence our evaluations of their abilities.

We think that our system can avoid doing crazy things like anointing the Indians the third-best team in baseball (where they score this week in WAR%), when the crowd initially thought Cleveland would be the 27th best team in the game. We’ll still acknowledge that the Indians’ performance has improved over the team’s expected performance going forward.

Our week will be Monday through Sunday, so expect each new installment on Monday afternoon. As always, we want to know what you think, so be sure to let us know in the comments.

1. New York Yankees: WAR% – .682 (2), FAN% – .580 (2), TOTAL% – .596
Despite quietly getting off to a great start — thanks to some unlikely contributions — those covering the Yankees still want you to think that the sky is falling.

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Stage hypnotists make a living calling people up on stage and making them believe that they’re something they’re not, be it a lion, a pirate or even Kanye West. Someone may want to look at the Yankees payroll to see if they have a hypnotist on payroll this season, because all of a sudden Bartolo Colon — after allowing just three runs in his first 14 2/3 innings as a starter this year — has been transformed into a quality Major League starter once again.

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The Minnesota Twins are generally criticized for being too conservative. But this season, they have shown a bit of early-season panic. First, Joe Nathan was granted his wish of being removed from the closer role two weeks into the season, and now manager Ron Gardenhire has decided to fill his vacancy at second base with a guy who hasn’t played there in six years.
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It happens every year. A manager gets an itchy trigger finger early in the season and buries a guy before he even gets a chance to earn the faith the manager put in him to start the season. This year is no different, and with an idea sparked from Eric Seidman’s piece yesterday on Brad Emaus — an article that the Mets completely ignored when they waived him today — I present the 2011 Brad Emaus All-Stars.
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