We have standings!
Lawyers spend a lot of time on questions of standing(s). I just got back from my Constitutional Law class where we were discussing Baker v. Carr, the case in which the Supreme Court ruled that voters have standing to sue if their states draw legislative district lines that violate the principle of one person one vote.
And now I sit here granting each of you standings of your own. To wit:
| EFL | ||||||
| TEAM | WINS | LOSSES | PCT. | GB | RS | RA |
| Canberra Kangaroos | 1 | 0 | .694 | — | 7.0 | 4.6 |
| Kaline Drive | 1 | 0 | .541 | 0.2 | 5.0 | 4.6 |
| D.C. Talk | 0 | 0 | .000 | 0.2 | 0.0 | 0.0 |
| Haviland Dragons | 0 | 1 | .372 | 0.3 | 2.4 | 3.2 |
| Cottage Cheese | 0 | 1 | .328 | 0.4 | 5.1 | 7.3 |
| Peshastin Pears | 0 | 1 | .262 | 0.4 | 3.7 | 6.2 |
| Old Detroit Wolverines | 1 | 1 | .367 | 0.5 | 6.6 | 8.7 |
| Portland Rosebuds | 0 | 1 | .193 | 0.5 | 2.7 | 5.5 |
| Pittsburgh Alleghenys | 0 | 1 | .061 | 0.6 | 1.8 | 6.9 |
| Flint Hill Tornadoes | 0 | 2 | .181 | 0.8 | 7.7 | 16.4 |
You can see these standings on the EFL website if you make the screen wide enough and scroll a little bit down, looking to the right.
Some caveats:
- Standings early in the month don’t mean much. Some of us are still awaiting the debuts of some of our key players. Some of us haven’t seen a pitcher take the mound yet. (I had to make up stats for Pittsburgh’s David Price because the standings don’t work if a team has had no pitching yet. I gave Price a scoreless inning — so the Alleghenys’ place in the standings may be slightly exaggerated.) Until your rotation rotates once you will get skewed results.
- D.C. needs to be careful. You’re sitting awfully high in the tree up there in third place. A few years ago, when the Cheese debuted, they started by leading in the standings for nearly a week. The baseball gods were clearly offended. For the last two years, the Cheese spent the offseason being projected to win, or to come very close. But that hasn’t happened. Know your place, Balk, and pay your dues so the fates smile upon you later when you’ve built a good team on paper.
- Portland needs to be careful. You were projected just Sunday to come very close to winning, or perhaps to win outright. But for the last two years, the Cheese spent the offseason being projected to wi… Oh, wait a minute. The Rosebuds are currently behind the Wolverines. Never mind. You’re fine.
One of the glories of my discipline — the law — is how alive it is. Historians can’t study something until it’s fixed in the past. Chemistry and math don’t change — they discover more, but the physical laws are immutable. But the law is constantly changing. Just yesterday the Supreme Court issued a ruling that we had to talk about in class today because we were talking about constitutional issues in elections. So if I had issued “standings” on the constitutional law of elections yesterday morning, I would have to update them today because something has changed.
This is another way the EFL is like the law, to its glory: we will have different standings tomorrow.