Mid-Season Progress Report

The mid-point of the inaugural season for the New Jersey Transit All-Stars sees them sporting, for the first time in their history, a record worthy of a playoff spot. 11 weeks of frequent and only ostensibly aimless roster manipulation have led the All-Stars into the teeth of the playoff race. However, extraordinary parity among the Intergalactic Destroyers to this point suggests that any self-satisfaction on the part of the division's current leaders ill-suits the jostling for position sure to continue through the season's second half.

The same cannot so easily be said about the race for a playoff spot in the much less fluid Defenders of the Stars division. After quick starts propelled Impending Doom, béisbol and the Beasts of Burden to the front of the pack, shuffling at the top has failed to keep numbers one through three from building more than 20-game leads on the rest of the division. Though 20 games is all that separates the first and last of the somewhat democratic Destroyers, unorthodox managerial decisions on the part of the Slippery Logicians and a failure to gain much traction on the part of the other three teams currently looking from the outside in on the playoff picture has created a rather rigid caste system. It remains unclear whether any team among the three forming the Defenders' version of a petty bourgeois--The Poppersteins, PinYELLa, and Hunters--has the ingenuity, determination, and free time otherwise occupied by more rewarding social experiences necessary to challenge the hegemony at the top.

There is, however, hope. At least one of the division's three topmost seems ripe for the picking. Though revered baseball minds Mordecai and Shaun are clearly still at work putting together a championship-caliber rosters for Impending Doom and Beasts of Burden, respectively, noted BoDeans enthusiast and small-market football team fan Sam McMyler has yet to take even a sniff at the free agent pool. One can only assume a similar indifference from Sam toward the trade market, which begs the question how he expects to arrive at September with a shot at an all-important championship. Now 18 games ahead of Kei and her Poppersteins, béisbol has ridden a closer-heavy pitching staff and 4th-round wunderkind Ubaldo Jiménez to a league-leading 9.45 K/9, 1.91 ERA, 1.03 WHIP and 63 Saves. However, a weekly pitching volume more than 10 innings below league average, the unlikelihood that Jiménez maintains a 30-win pace through the season's next eleven weeks, and the ever more easily distinguished gap between legitimate and untrustworthy candidates for the other pitching staffs among the Marauders of Time would seem to seriously limit béisbol's ability to compete in more than 3 pitching categories per week from here forward. This team is still in position to gain an even tighter grip on the saves market, should the White Sox revert to their form of one month ago and trade away Bobby Jenks. Without more starting pitching, however, béisbol will find it very difficult to capitalize on Matt Thornton's potential move to the closer's role, and even Mariano Rivera's talents are taxed when asked to do more than rake in saves.

Offensively, béisbol sits above average in the power categories alone, and if not for the spectacular production of final-round draft pick Chris Young and 14th-rounder Alex Ríos could be dwelling among the pretenders of the Defenders rather than the contenders. Offensive production in the short term will only decline as a result of SS Troy Tulowitzski's broken wrist, though it's too early to predict a decline of the battery equal to that we should expect of béisbol's pitching staff. Aramis Ramirez remains a second-half sleeper and Carlos Peña is only getting closer to the incentive of real-life MLB free agency. Yet, just as is the case for the pitching categories, stiffening competition and a roster able to compete regularly for only half the weekly points will not present much of a challenge in the playoffs, if the team can indeed make it that far.

With this, I present a ranking of ranks. The unofficial Marauders of Time Power Rankings are simply the average of the average weekly ranks of each team in all scored categories:

1. BEASTS OF BURDEN
2. NJ Transit All-Stars
3. Hit by Pitch
4. Stunna
5. Impending Doom
6. béisbol
7. The Wabash Mashers
8. Mendoza Manatees
9. Waste Wildenstein
10. Ladies Love Us
11. The Poppersteins
12. PinYELLa
13. Hunters
14. Slippery Logicians

Notes: The biggest discrepancy between average weekly rank in all categories and actual record is that of Waste Wildenstein. Like béisbol and Ladies Love Us, Waste Wildenstein is exceptionally consistent in the power categories. However, the return on investment in power is exceptionally fickle, for though béisbol has a record of 8-3 in total home runs, WW rests only a half game above .500 and LLU, meanwhile, a half game below in the same category. In contrast, the Beasts of Burden maintain one of the lowest scores for consistent power production and yet have managed the third-best record in this category in the league. In HR's and RBI's seems to lie the greatest gap between the totals a team puts up relative to the rest of the league and the wins and losses that correlate to those totals.

That argument, though perhaps explaining a worse-than-expected record for Ladies Love Us and a better-than-expected record for béisbol, fails to address the success of Waste Wildenstein to date. In fact, on that argument Waste Wildenstein should be much better in the second half, provided outliers regress to the mean. The unfounded part of WW's success are the wins and losses the team has gained in volume pitching stats. Mediocre strikeout and quality start numbers have somehow resulted in league-leading records in these categories, and unless the luck holds for another 11 weeks, it's unlikely opponents will fail to take more than they lose against the league's current overall leader.

Good luck to all the managers in what's left of Week 12.

UPDATE: This week's team in focus, béisbol, suffers another setback: Dustin Pedroia goes on the 15-Day DL with a broken bone in his foot. For the Poppersteins, PinYELLa, and Hunters to make up some ground the time is now...