Archive for 2012 Organizational Rankings

Before we start rolling out our list on Monday, we figured it’d be fun to give you guys a chance to weigh in. I’ve taken the spreadsheet that we gave to our authors and put it in a viewable Google Doc, so you can simply export it to Excel and fill in the grades for each team yourself, and see what your personal organizational rankings would look like.

The document can be found here. Our methodology is explained here, and as I noted in that post, we’re using the 20-80 scale for grading. Keep in mind that you want your average grade for each category to come out to 50 (or something very close to it), and each 10 point increment represents one standard deviation from the mean. 60 is above average, 70 is excellent, and 80 is historically great. Grades above 70 and below 30 are pretty special, and shouldn’t just be handed out easily.

If you’d like to share your rankings with the world, feel free to do so in the comments section.

Update: Sky Kalkman has agreed to act as the compiler of ballots, so if you’d like your ballot counted in a composite ranking, simply use this link and submit your ballot there. You’re still welcome to post them in the comments here for pride and glory as well.

On Monday, we’ll roll out the beginning of our annual Organizational Rankings series – the plan is to do three teams a day for 10 days, concluding with the top three teams on April 4th. Before we begin discussing each franchise, however, I thought it’d be helpful to explain some of the changes we’ve made to the system this year.

Last year, we made one key change that we’re carrying over, and will likely remain in place going forward: our authors were asked to grade individual inputs rather than overall organizational strength. Grading by components adds a layer of transparency that is important, as you can see exactly why a team ended up placing in the specific spot they land.

However, we’re upgrading the implementation of that grading scale this year. Last year, I asked all of our authors to assign letter grades to each organization in three categories: Present Talent, Financial Resources, and Baseball Operations, and then had the three guys on staff who specialized in prospect analysis grade them out in terms of Future Talent as well. We then converted the letter grades for those four variables into scores, assigned weights to the individual categories, and used the weighted averages to create a total score.

There were a few problems that arose by doing things that way, however, and we’re doing our best to fix those issues this year. Here’s how:

Read the rest of this entry »